Stuart was not happy with her breasts.

Every thing else about the young woman who was lying on the duvet before him was right, especially her deep blue eyes and long blonde hair.  Her torso was perfect, just the right curves above the legs, and the long fingers that held an apple in her left hand and were draped on the floor on her right were exquisite.

But her breasts just did not situate themselves well on her chest as she lay there.  He was on his fourth cartoon on the canvas, trying to work with them, but somehow it just wasn’t gelling.

“Um, luv,”  he asked her, not sure what her name was again, Cathy or Patty something.  ”You think you could, um, shift a little to the side?”

“Which side, Mr. Sutcliffe?”  she asked.

“Call me Stu, luv, you shouldn’t be so tense.  To your left… just the lower part of you, there.”

“Me bum, you mean?”

Stuart thought a minute, tried to picture it in his mind.  “Well, let’s try that first.”

When she did, her chest was better aligned, but now the rest of her form was askew.

“How about the shoulders as well,”  he asked,  “but not as far over.”

After she complied, Stuart could only shake his head.  He could see his disappointment in her reflected in her large doe eyes.

She got up and put on the kimono at the side of the set.  “I hope you don’t mind,”  she said as she wrapped the belt,  “but I was getting a bit cold.”

“So was I, luv,”  he said.  “I hate to say, but if it takes over an hour of you sitting there and I have nothing to show for it, it’s as good as given me chances of getting anything done are gone.”

She looked down after he said that; he wondered if she really needed the sitting fee.  “Are you sacking me, then?”  she asked.

“Nothing really like that.  I mean, you are an attractive woman, and I’m sure your boyfriend or suitor’s a lucky bloke-“

“I don’t have one,”  she burst out, quickly.

It took Stuart a few minutes to regain himself.  The old conflict reared again in him, his Mersey manhood against his painter professionalism.  “What I’m trying to say, here, is that for this piece it’s just not working, but I would like to keep you in mind for another work later on.  I do think you’d make a smashing subject, in another painting.”

She gave a slight smile.  “Shall I dress, then?”

“Yes.  Of course, as you did sit for me, a fee is owed you.  Will you take a checque?”

“Yes,”  she said as she disappeared behind the silk screen Stuart set up for her to change behind.  “It’s spelled B-O-Y-D.”

Stuart looked for the checkbook, hoping that in the interim she’d get around to giving him her first name as well…

***

After Patty Boyd left, turning down an offer to be seen to the bus stop, Stuart opened a bottle of claret.  He wondered if he had been too hasty; any bird who would take the bus alone into and out of Clapham was certainly someone you couldn’t just dismiss.  He made sure he had her contact information and put that in the file book folder, alongside the photo she’d given him and a few etches he had of her.

By accident, he dropped the information about Victoria out of the folder and cursed as her picture looked up at him.  Whatever thought he’d had about taking the relationship with the last model in his studio beyond the professional level was frozen as he remembered her.  He had quite a mad whir with Victoria after he’d completed “Citizens Unchained” and “With This Rib…” and she made most of 1966 a fairly happy year.  When the fights started in October over his lack of commitment, that balanced things a bit.  When she was gone, that was that; both paintings were bought by American collectors and she went to Italy, so the only thing he had left of her in all of England was the file.

Stuart picked up the contents, looked deeply into the shot he took of her face, and accidentally dropped from behind it the photo of the full figure study.

Now fully depressed, he swigged a drink from the mouth of the claret bottle.  Not able to throw away Victoria’s information, he skulked over to the duvet and slouched onto it.

The last model’s smell was in the cushions.  He took a drink, trying to remember how long it’d been since he’d gotten satisfactorily intimate.  After Victoria, there’d been a few, a quick one here and there and one weekend in New York that in the end meant little, but no real ties.  And with the notice and the commissions keeping him busy, it’d been-

Stuart has to count back aloud, so shocked was he at the realization.  “Two bloody years, nearly,”  he said to no one.

He took a long, deep draught from the claret, the gray London skies seeming even gloomier through the skylight…

***

The ringing of the bell at the door sounded like angry hornets, usually.  Through the hazy sleep that Stuart had been in, it sounded like all of Whitehall rolling into the Thames.

As his hand moved on the floor, he heard clinking.  Stuart had wondered if he actually did get up to get a second bottle.  He used what little strength he had to stand after confirming this, then tried to pull into himself all the energy that was in the studio to stabilize himself the way a sail catches wind.

The bell was even more insistent.

“Aw, bloody fuckin’ ‘ell!” Stuart screamed, the anger in saying that giving him enough energy to answer the door.

Whatever fuzziness Stuart had been under was dissipated when he saw who was there.  The man who’d been at the bell was Stuart’s age, in his late twenties, with a short crop of auburn hair.  By his clothes, Stuart ruled out that the visitor was in the service.  The National Health glasses the visitor wore were bent at the bridge to the point where a good head shake would have destroyed them.  His shabby clothes had patches of grease that smelled of some of the cheaper cod one could get at the local chip shop.

“An’ ‘ow’s it been, Stu?”  the visitor asked, smiling a wide smile that was missing an incisor.  “You remember me, don’t you mate?”

“That you, John?”  Stuart asked him, stunned.

“Aye, Johnny Lennon of the old school,”  he said, moving his way past him into the studio.  “Took me a bit to make it ‘ere, finally.”

“What, the tube from King’s Cross is out?”

“Ye sound cross, Stu.  Like you didn’t care to see,”  John said, with a bit of a put on.

“Actually, I didn’t expect you.  I was-“  Stu froze as he saw that John had found a few sketches of Victoria that he forgot to file away.  The figure studies, no less.

“Oy, she’s a goer,”  he said with a leer.  “Bet she’s worth a bit after the paints are put away, eh?”

“Actually, she wasn’t worth it in the end,”  Stu said as he forced himself to not look as he put the sketches away.  “Touchy subject.  What’s the pleasure, John?”

“You get them to come on by and just get nakers for you right there, Stu?  Now that’s a life I could get into.”

“Provided you pay them afterwards.”

“I thought that could get you nicked and put before a magistrate.”

“If you pay them to sleep with you, you do.  And how long has it been since you were in art school?”  Stu asked, as John took a seat on the divan.

“Ah, that.  Didn’t much keep up with it in the end.  You see, I didn’t have a bass player.”  John spat out the last two words.

“Oh Christ, not this again.”

“Oh, no, Stu, I’m not bitter.  Not even a bit.  Not even the teeniest, weeniest bit out of joint by it.  You cad.”

Stu wanted to be offended, but the way John smiled and tortured his face as he said that left him no option but to give a smile.  “Never could tell with you,”  Stu admitted.  “Don’t know what I can offer you here, I’d have to look.”

“Somehow, I’d imagined the famous Stuart Sutcliffe would be doing better by himself than this,”  John said as he looked around.

“My choice, mate.  I tried a house in St. Johns Wood a few years ago, after the first big London show, but I could never do anything with all those flowers and sunshine about.  Me muse needed something a bit more edgy, a bit closer to the gnarly side of life, so I sold the house and came here to this side of the river.”  Stu found some cheese in the icebox and crackers in the cupboard, and with some resignation grabbed another bottle of claret.

“And so you’re on the wrong side of the Thames getting to look up the little girls’ dresses,”  said John as he reached for the crackers.

“Can’t help meself.  I seem to have a knack for painting the women.”

“Well, it certainly did get you further along than all that cubism crap and depressing watercolors.”

Stu’s eyes widened.  “You followed me progress?”

“You make it sound like I gave up entirely on art.”

“I wouldn’t know, mate.  It’d been what, seven years since last I saw you.”

“Good bit of time away, that,”  said John as he poured himself a very full glass of the claret.

“So what happened to you?  I thought yer band was going to go somewhere.”

“Never really happened.  We tried, but I think you were right.”

“John, I was angry when-“

John held up his hand as he cut off Stu,  “No, what you said after I came round trying to nick you of your money again, how rock and roll was a dying form of expression.  You were right, Stu, it was.”

“John, look.  I never got sixty-five pounds before, and I really wanted to get the paints.  I was trying not to join your band, not tell you to quit at it.”

“I didn’t quit, mate.  I was retired, by order of the Queen.”

“I don’t follow.”

“We had a gig in Bootle, right after you left for London.  Nasty little set with a bunch of teds and mods who didn’t care to be in the same room.  Someone shoved another, and it all, well…”  John’s hand rolled as he stuffed a large piece of cheese into his mouth.

“So that broke up the band, the fight?”

“More me having to change my address to Hornby Road.  HMP Liverpool, actually.”

“Christ almighty John, what happened?”

John refilled and drained his glass again, and said in a low voice, his hand shaking on the bottle as he poured,  “I swear to you, I didn’t think hitting him he was going to bounce like that.  I didn’t know he’d fall into someone else’s knife.  The magistrate, he was after everyone involved in the fight, and-“

“Oh God, John,”  said Stu.  “Nobody told me you’d been sent to the clink.  I didn’t even know you were there.  I don’t even think the Beeb mentioned any details about that, except for eight dead in the melee.  If they had even mentioned your band once, I would have come up there right away.  I swear.”

“Well, Mimi of course kept her lip up, refused to discus it.  Thought it might just go away if no one ‘ad ever ‘erd about it.  She was good about it when they finally released me, met me at the gate and all.”

Stu shook his head.  “If I’d known, John, I’d…”  He trailed off, not sure what he could say.

“Wouldn’t have been much good, Stu.  A few years in there, it was better no one came around.”

“What, no one?”

“Mimi, of course,”  said John as he poured another glass of wine,  “and Cynthia.  You remember her?  Came by once to tell me she’d found a shop owner’s boy she wanted to marry.  Said goodbye nicely to me, at least I think she thought she did.”

“Oh bloody hell.  I’m so sorry, I should have come up.”

“Not that I’d blame you.  With all the attention that ‘Their Finest Hour’ was getting, you couldn’t afford to be seen with a known criminal, could you?”

“Hold up, John.  That’s unfair to think I’d have let you rot there.”

“We were in different worlds by then.  Even though part of me thought yer press was going to get you sent to the Tower for treason.”  John read Stu’s eyes and added,  “Oh yeah, I did follow it, the whole thing about your series of watercolors.  The dark side of the war and all that, though I found them pretty cheery.  The prison library had itself a good section on the arts and current events.  Wasn’t like they’d sent me to the rock pile the whole time.”

Stu took a cracker and spread some cheese on it.  “The MBE holders who sent all those nasty letters to the editor were harmless.  Saw a couple of them two years ago, when they hung ‘Whitehall’ at the Tate.”

“Was that the one of the House of Lords aflame with all the crying people in front of it?”

“Aye, that one.  Man who was in the Navy told me he thought it was brilliant.  Course, he told me a little later on he worked with Peter Sellers on his records, so maybe he was of the right mind to like it.”

“Or the wrong mind if he worked with the Goons.”

“There’s that, aye.”  Stu got up to get another bottle, hoping John might slow down enough to let him have a glass of his own stock.

“And now you’re doing these women.  What got you following the Americans in figure studies?”

“Trip out there, in spring of ‘66,”  said Stu as he returned with the bottle.  John immediately helped himself to another glass.  “Spent a few weeks in New York with all the artists working there.  Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Grace Slick, Yoko Ono-“

“Who?”  asked John.

“An unusual artist.  Unlike the rest of the crowd, she does performances with props.  Tough things to deal with, but she had some interesting perspectives.  Grace and I were in this café in Soho with her, and she had some good theories about why figure studies are so in demand.”

“And what did she say?”  John asked, her nervousness replaced by an induced numbing.

“Mostly that people want to live.  It’s been nearly a generation since the war, she pointed out, and since then every day’s carried the threat of atomic death.  People want to forget that, do something positive-“

“Like sleep with each other?”

“Yes, right on.  You would have liked talking with her, John.”

“Would I have liked sleeping with her?”  John asked with mischief in his eyes.

“I wouldn’t know,”  said Stu, as he tried to look away without appearing to.  “I never asked her for that.”  Stu hoped he wouldn’t ask about Grace and force him to bring up that weekend…

Instead, John said,  “Well, what I’ve seen of your stuff is good.  Great, even.  Had a chance to do a little catching the sights before I came here.  Nice location you’ve got in the Tate, mate..”

Stu looked at John.  “So how long have you been in the city?  Where are you staying?”

John made no effort to hide his avoidance of Stu’s eyes.

“John?”  Stu asked softly.  “What is it?”

“I’m not half of meself anymore,”  John said.  “I had very little going for me before jail, and even less now that I’m out.  Mimi’s letting me stay with her until I’m on me feet, but that may never come.”

“Are there any prospects at all?  Anyone who can help?”

“I tried.  George went and became an electrician in Manchester, but he’s got a third child on the way and can’t do much.  Pete up and left Liddypool for good while I was locked up, and never told anyone where he was going.  Paul was supposed to have come here and tried his hand at a musician or poet, depending on who you asked, but he’s left so many landlords holding the sack all I get when I come round to his last known places are threats to pass on to ‘im.  Stu, I don’t know what I’m going to do.”

Stu sighed.  “John, I don’t know what to tell you.  It’s not like I have steady work to offer you.  And the last time we shared a place, we nearly knocked each other’s blocks off.”

“I was an ass, then.  A bit hot and randy.  I know I tried to talk you into a lot of things.  Some of them pretty stupid, really.”

“If you mean the bass guitar thing, that’s old business.”

“Thanks,”  said John, with some relief.  “I don’t know what to say.  I don’t want to be a burden on you, and I’m not asking you to let me sponge off you like I did before.”

“John, I don’t know what I can tell you.  It’s-“

There was a brief flash in John as his form shifted.  Stu thought he saw his old friend clamp down hard to keep from bawling, his pride trying to put armor over a very soft center.

Stu looked again at John, who was doing a very good job of keeping his vulnerabilities inside.  The more he looked at John and his inner struggle, the more the idea came into Stuart’s head, first as a dull notion, then exploding like a sharp pain.

“John,”  said Stuart, trying to stay calm,  “I think I have an idea.”

“Eh?”

“Hear me out first before you say anything…”

***

Stuart never liked the high-collared shirts that were all the rage at exhibitions, but he found that a good swallow every few minutes burped his shirt enough to let some air out and keep him cool under the jacket.

The sweat that had been building up under his collar was dissipating as he watched the attendees stare at the work.  His dire imaginings of disgust and anger never came true.  What surprised him the most were the reactions of the women who viewed the work; he wondered if they thought the same things that men did when they saw such things…

“Excuse me,”  said a woman in her forties who was trying to get around Stuart.

Stuart stepped aside so that she could see the card.

“Ah,”  she said as she read,  “interesting title, ‘Want of a Nail.’  I can see that, yes.  He is something like a beaten Roman or a fallen Greek god, the way the artist used all of the classical trappings.  How he could have stayed on top if the young man just had a chance.”

Stuart hid a smile at not being recognized, and played along.  “Yes, especially the broken vase and half-eaten apple.  I heard the model started to eat the fruit soon after the painting started and had a row with the artist over it.”

“Really?  Do you know the model?”

Stuart read her eyes and tried to hide his own amusement.  “I think the man is from up north.  Liverpool, I believe.”

She turned back to the painting of John, and Stuart watched her eyes find their way to his prominent feature.  He had surely thought that his painting a man in the nude might raise some questions and possibly set the Old Bailey to invoke the decency statutes that they talked about using but never enforced-

“Mr. Sutcliffe?”  a man at Stuart’s right asked.

 He turned and tried to look away.  Stuart recognized him as coming into the gallery with a photographer from the Globe, and he didn’t fancy talking with anyone from Fleet Street at the moment.

“Mr. Sutcliffe, please,”  the reporter pressed him.  “I just need your reaction.”

“I’m sure you have something pat you can fill your paper with,”  Stuart said without meeting his eyes.  “Something about the adulation of the crowds.  Maybe you can make up something about screaming girls-“

“Actually, sir,”  he said with some insistence,  “I was more interested in your reaction to word from the Palace that you may be on the short list.”

Stuart’s attention was his, and for the first time he looked at the reporter, a young man about his age with a large nose.  “The what?”

“There’s word that you’re on the list as one of the final choices for the official portrait,”  said the reporter.  Stuart looked at his press card, which read P. TOWNSHEND, then at his eyes, which seemed more honest than any reporter’s Stuart had ever talked to.  “It’s on good source that you may win the commission to paint the Prince’s official portrait after he’s invested next year as Prince of Wales.”

Stuart finally replied when the shock wore off,  “Well, if that’s indeed the circumstance, I would certainly be honored.  I’m sorry to say, Mr. Townshend-“

“Please, call me Pete.”

“Well, Pete, as I was saying, I have not be told yet that I’m in the running.  Perhaps when the Palace makes up its mind and tells me, I can concentrate more fully on how I’ll approach that commission at the time.”

Pete took a long look at the new painting and said,  “I think after they see this, they should move you to the front of the queue.”

“You don’t think me having a Northern boy with his John Thomas out is going to shock them too much?”

“If they’re serious about art, no.  Your lines are impeccable, a sort of Bauhaus-meets-Rococo blending, and you’ve got a full pallette that’s almost photo-realistic.”

“You know,”  said Stuart,  “you’re the first Fleet Street writer I’ve met who actually seems to know art.”

“Just me luck.  Right place, right time.  That’s all anyone can ask for.”

“True enough,”  said Stuart, as he looked again at John’s face on the painting.  “Did you know the man who sat for this was paid three hundred quid?”

Pete’s eyes widened.  “That’s a lot for a model’s services.”

“There’s actually a very good story behind it,”  said Stuart, hoping that what he was going to tell this reporter might be of some help to John…

James Ryan has been on the verge of actually being recognized as a writer in the past; who knows, someday it may happen.... His work has appeared in such places as Dragon magazine, Lacunae, the Urbanite, the New York Times, and some of the better men's room walls across the state of New York. Until he gets the chance to follow the program for disenfranchised neurotic writers, he's doing the regular job and grad school schtick. His wife Susan and son Jamie just nod and smile when he starts to rant, which, all said, makes things that much easier.