Oopsie
Barney is drawing in his living room. He doesn’t remember learning to draw. Because he didn’t learn. He just always could. In fact, calling drawing “drawing” doesn’t really capture what’s happening. It’s not like taking out the trash. When you take out the trash, there’s a clear objective and you can measure it afterward. But when you draw, there’s no way to know when you’ve completed whatever you were trying to do and most of the time, he doesn’t even know what he was trying to do in the first place. His mother says he was 4–5 years old when he began putting perfect drawings of horses in strange places in the house. That they thought were stickers or some sort of stuck-on tattoo of an etching that he’d found somewhere. Maybe a weird stain? And then eventually, Barney showed them what he was doing. And their faces reflected one of the first shock and awe surprises that he could remember — the amount of shock had simply exceeded what either of his parents could be comfortable with. As he remembers it, mom and dad just stopped talking. They framed the first few ‘works’ when he was very young and then eventually he began to hate every single image within a few minutes of finishing it so they couldn’t go anywhere but in a pad, easily hidden. He couldn’t bear to see them at all most of the time. He drew it, and then forgot it existed.
Sometimes friends would ask Barney about how he draws like there’s a secret he might be able to share with them, but there isn’t. If there is a secret, it’s probably just: “look?”Just look. And if you think that’s trite, then “really look?” Like Rafiki with Simba’s face over the water trying to make him see Mufasa there. “Look… harder.”
Today, he’s drawing hands. Hands are frequently difficult to get right for most people, but for Barney, they’re a kind of warm-up stretch. He notices how many artists will give up when they get to the hands. Either leaving them out or putting mittens, reducing the number of fingers, hiding them behind their backs. He doesn’t think of this as cowardly, but he also doesn’t really understand why they don’t enjoy drawing them. He chooses to do them first. Fingers are like a mini architecture of the human body. If you can’t get their structure right, why would you be able to get any other part right? It’s all about quick lines for phalanges. Never outlines. Never outlines for anything, really. But especially for fingers. Which is what many artists get wrong. They’re trying to draw the shape of a hand but this is nonsense, there’s no shape. Light is hitting a surface and shadows need to be represented. For fingers, all it takes is a few strokes. Get in, get out, get your pencil away from there.
For Jackie’s fingers… it’s taking a few more strokes than usual. She has such long ones. Elegant and thin, but not bony. Teacher fingers? Ew. No. Why does his mind keep going there?
He’s drawn Jackie —who existed as ‘Ms. Gossy’ in musty corners of his psyche until creepily recently — thousands of times, probably. If you count every tiny little sketch of… everything. He thought that was his way of getting her out of his head. But when he looks at them afterward, they don’t necessarily look like her hands, or hips or shirt or neck and collarbones.
She’s more than beautiful, she’s sharp. The sharpest. The kind of mind that flips through proofs in her head, then asks which variation you want. Her brain was made for mathematics. It produced a wake.
Often left hand is on her hip, when she’s writing on the board. You know because there’s a handprint on her blazer. Her thumb gets hooked exactly the same way in the loop of her jeans if she’s wearing jeans. Barney saw a pair of daisy dukes and thought, “Calm down. Calm down. Don’t say anything. Good things come to those who wait.”
And they do, but not in daisy dukes. Instead, yesterday, Jackie had just walked into the kitchen… naked. Or wearing a thing. Thong. Thing-thing. Thong. The expression on her face, absurdly uncertain. Like walking in with a tank and asking if it’s heavy. Barney isn’t sure if he’d ever been more happily confused by a human being in his life.
“Huh — well… hi there babe. Are you… warm?”
“Hi. Do I look okay?”
“Wuh- which part,” gulp, “Are you uncertain someone might,” double gulp, “Possibly not be okay with? Exactly?”
“I’m old, don’t I look old? I look like shit.”
“No. No you do not.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes... Yes I am very very sure.”
“But I’m old?”
“It must be an extremely relative term when applied to you, babe.”
“So I don’t look… old to you, right now? Like… in terms of saggage?”
“Sa -? Ha! No. Actually, I don’t think there’s enough stress in the entire universe to sufficiently stress just how much you should… not change a single thing about yourself. I am questioning reality because of your physical too-good-to-be-trueness right now.”
“Yeah? Well…what about…back here? Good?”
“Very good. And feel free to keep showing me stuff? This is a fun game.”
Lewd, but that sufficiently describes much of all he’s been thinking about since. And also what they did all of yesterday evening. Just recalling her standing there in all her glory is an adrenalyn shot.
Barney’s in his house, drawing his former teacher naked. The house is quiet. Jackie won’t be back for hours. He doesn’t think of her as a teacher anymore. And he only took one class with her. Linear. They barely spoke. But… then they hooked up? Cause he tricked her, basically. But all’s fair in blah blah blah, isn’t it? Wasn’t even fully conscious of what he was doing, if he’s being honest with himself. Just desperate. Obsessed.For the first time ever, it was like he tricked himself, into getting what he’d truly wanted all along. And as it stood, that feeling was unsettling. What else could he trick himself into?
Did… oh, did Jackie say after her lectures she has a department meeting? Crap. Then she said something about… whatever, Barney couldn’t care less about the details. Why is life so hard? The daily exhaustion of trying to understand people’s bad enough. To the extent of consciously making individual muscles move, but everything else is conscious. And the spotlight has to be on 24/7! Do the right things! At the right times! If you’re not conscious, you’ll fuck up! Remain hyper-aware of what you are doing at all times! Fake emotions! Blend in! Ignore whatever signals your body is telling you! Ignore your boredom! Ignore your misery! Ignore ignore ignore! And perhaps eventually controlling emotions, thoughts, ideas, flights of fancy, impulses becomes too much. Life is too much. Death sounds, peaceful.
Just remembering to look into someone’s eyes while they’re striving to bore him into an even earlier grave is a full time occupation. Nothing makes sense. Everyone on Earth talks like adults in Charlie Brown.
And he can’t detect patterns that aren’t random easter eggs the carpet designer snuck into the edge motif. Recalling information is so effortless it may as well not even register it as a skill. But everything else in human existence exhausts those same faculties on a level that makes him wonder if there’s anything he isn’t missing. Like there’s 99 other crucial life skills aside from manipulating information abstractly or applying intellect to generate insight, all more useful and practical, and frankly he would trade more of everything else for less of the one, but there’s no skill reassignment after birth in this meta.
Nothing makes sense. Not people, not life. Jackie’s different, because she’s not boring, but she is boring too. Everything’s boring. She’s just… slightly less.
Seven and a half heads tall. That’s the ideal human height to skull proportion. Most real people are shorter, closer to seven. Models are typically closer to eight. Jackie is seven and one-quarter of her own heads tall exactly. He never measured that. Can eyeball most people’s dimensions on sight.
The human head divides into thirds. Hairline to brow, brow to bottom of nose, nose to chin. Eyes sit at the halfway point of the skull. Pupils centered on an invisible line drawn from ear to ear. Distance between eyes equals one eye width exactly. Mouth width aligns with pupils (when viewed from front). All these ratios Barney absorbed from textbooks in early single digit ages he doesn’t remember. Memorized like paintings in a museum. Wandering around imaginary physical spaces in his memory, a curator. With certainty can he find any piece, it causes no anxiety to store or retrieve. Barely requires effort to use. Sometimes it requires more effort to get himself out after ending up stuck in there during unnoticed hours of memorization. And eventually, he doesn’t even need to check things, they’re just, known.
The golden ratio appears frequently in much of human anatomy, not necessarily related to beauty but the simple mechanics of limbs. The relationship between joints contains the Fibonacci sequence in every body, as far as he knows. Jackie’s too. Not nearly as closely as you’d find Phi in Alanna’s dimensions, mind you, but Jackie’s hip-to-waist ratio is still 1.6. The curve of her spine. 1.618. The length of her fingers relative to palm… 1.62… so she has long fingers. Perfectly long. Perfect Jackie.
Shadows follow rules too. Core shadow. Cast shadow. Reflected light. Terminator line where light transitions to dark. These are physical laws, but also artistic concepts. Most draw what they think they see. Barney draws what he thinks is there before he ‘sees’ anything.
Human shoulders span two head-widths. Distance from shoulder to elbow equals distance from elbow to wrist. Hand length is, surprisingly, equal to face length, but don’t let anybody trick you into demonstrating that.
Foot equals forearm, another thing that shocks most people and has grown adults on the floor touching their elbows to their heels like, “No shit?!
All these measurements stored, but not in his brain. In muscles, intuitions. No doubt. Become certain. Confidence is a choice. Have no doubt. His hand knows without asking where the next line should go if his waking mind would shut up long enough to let that happen.
It’s different for his girlfriends though. Can’t draw a generic female body. Narrower shoulders. Wider pelvis. Higher waist. Longer neck relative to torso. Jackie’s proportions, though she’d hate hearing it, would be deemed, “Classical,” harkening to the Renaissance, in a figure drawing class.
Barney doesn’t consciously catalog while drawing. At no point will his mind ever think: “shoulders here? hip line there?” It would be like relearning how to swallow from scratch, oft described as one of the most challenging rehabilitations to experience. His hand moves like most people move the bolus of the food down into their esophagus for peristalsis onward. The food can go nowhere else?
Likewise, when he draws, the line goes where it goes. They all do. He doesn’t “draw.” Just present, while his hand makes the lines. Why, you ask, must it go, there and be swooped like that? Because it can go nowhere else! Because it can have no other curve! Or opacity!
To draw a body, remember, each muscle’s origin and insertion. Remember each bone’s landmarks and processes. Remember the shapes of the bones as they exist independently, how they’re attached and finally, the way skin conceals it all into smoothness and shadows. He can see the little scar over knuckles. The subtle hollows beside each taught tendon in her neck.
In this drawing she’s just standing on two feet. Not contrapposto, but in class she frequently stands in perfect pose for a statue. Her weight-bearing leg creates a dropped hip, and with the raised shoulder holding the chalk there’s an S-curve. Ancient Greeks found this to be the solution to making stone carvings of humans appear more alive. Jacjac stands like that cause she has bad posture. Also her back hurts. Weight on her right foot, left hip cocked, her right shoulder slightly higher with her head tilted. Muah! Hold it right there baby! For about… six hours. Fortunately he can draw from memory or the present work wouldn’t be possible. She’d never pose for him, but definitely never naked.
Polynomial equations streaming across a blackboard behind her, the lady stands like a classical sculpture.
Sigh. Gosh she’s pretty.
People at school wonder why Barney never takes notes. Cause he wouldn’t read them if he did? Why bother? Once memorized even knowledge encoded years ago can be nearly losslessly retrieved nearly instantly when needed. Seven-and-a-half heads. Third divisions. The golden ratio 1 to Phi. Core shadows. Reflected light. Once these were things to be memorized. Eventually they become second nature.
He’s using the colored pencils she bought him last week. She said they were a pre-birthday present to herself and he had to draw her something. He can’t give her this!”Happy birthday, babe! Here. I drew your boobies.”
Sometimes Barney wonders if his draftsmanship isn’t… overdeveloped. For example why has he never used colours before? Colours are cool!
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He never uses them because graphite is faster, cleaner. And yet he knew, Jackie’s body needed vibrancy to give it justice. Saturation. Exactly how she looked in that moment. The warm tone of her skin in the evening kitchen light. The way her collarbones stuck out. The shadows under her breasts.
He’s lying on the floor of the living room. Notebook and many coloured pencils scattered across the floor like an evacuation drill. Clearly all these children dropped what they were doing. No adult would use this many colours for one drawing. It’s like he’s trying to get them all in?
What appears chaotic is. But that isn’t to say his subconscious can’t navigate the disorder. His mind tolerates it, even encourages it. “I need to get the things in here out too, it seems to suggest. “I don’t want to be your psychic hoarder landlord.”
What he’s doing now though — this drawing — is stupid. It’s burning the paper, it’s too real. She looks so goooood.
And anyone looking at this would know. Probably.
They would recognize Jackie Gossy, PhD, Associate Professor of Mathematics, standing naked, vulnerable, uncertain. They would see her in ways that nobody but he and anyone she showed herself would have any right to know. Her body doesn’t belong to him. He should stop drawing.
He should stop. Or destroy it. Yeah. Burn it, right now. Should never have started the damn thing.
But he can’t stop now, and won’t. Not until it’s done. Until the paper looks exactly like how she did yesterday, when she’d stood there asking if she was old but still beautiful anyway, as if those concepts in a normal sense could even apply.
For the background, to everyone’s astonishment, he changed it!
Yeah! Is this what using your imagination feels like?
But there was no choice, a half-finished kitchen was not a fitting backdrop. It did not do justice. So he drew a crazy wallpaper he saw once. That’s… what required so many colours. A psychedelic sunset. A humpback whale breaches against starlight. Somewhere between Kyle’s Dad getting high on cat piss wrestling in a sandbox ala South Park’s “Major Boobage” with just a good old fasioned acid-hallucination 70s rock album cover. Because that’s what standing there felt like.
Staring at her topless was like reality had cracked open Thanos had stepped through, with no gauntlet but an amazing rack.
Barney pauses crayon lazily adding nothing to the whale’s tail. What the fuck is he doing?! Making his girlfriend into some drug-trip fantasy princess like, like shit is this more Gerald Broflovski or Randy Marsh? Although that does miss the point entirely. The beauty of Jackie was never in some male gaze idealization.
She’s hot because she doesn’t give a fuck. She’s hot because she taps her pen against her front teeth while you’re talking to her which is so rude. She’s hot because she’s always doing crossword puzzles, looks up the answers when the clues are too hard, and has still never finished a single one. She’s hot cause she falls asleep in the middle of things like a puppy, whatever she’s doing. So when he finds her and wakes her up she makes him carry her to bed like little kids who conked out in the car.
Barney’s eyes gaze longingly at the figure encircled by his sad little cosmic tableau. Her slightly asymmetrical but perfectly round breasts. Her ribs. The way her pelvis tilts back making her hips jut forward. And… he’s back to fantasizing/drawing her again. Like a worshiper of some personal mythology.
The drawing is done, but he doesn’t want to let it go. Details can continue going into the background. Does she look right? Well yes, but he means, does it, the reproduction, accurately represent the subject it aims to? Does it grasp some part of their, “essence.” Mhmm, probs not.
Photorealistic figure against surrealist backdrop. That’s the caption. He stares at it critically. What the hell?
“Oops?”
Her fingers are too long. Her hands aren’t right. Dammit! Shit! Why? He spent all that time bragging about fingers in his head and now, hoisted! Somehow in the larger drawing, her hands seem off. Too small maybe? Or large? In either case, they’ve gone wrong. Proportions off, possibly by a millimeter but he’s too close to the elephant to see it now. Jesus! Look at those things! Might as well have drawn the poor lady with flippers.
He reaches for the eraser, stops. No? Yes. Yes. Worth fixing. Or? Better to start over? Better yet, since she’s coming home soon, and he shouldn’t be doing this at all, burn it in a fire?
Instead the eraser gets put to work. Thankfully her body hasn’t been colored in yet. He can fix the background to hide where the hands had been. Just… two lazy long lines to put her arms behind her back. There we are.
Like that’s what was always meant to happen. Serves him right for tempting fate. You win this round, the creepily dexterous human hand. He’ll hide the evidence of his failure by obscuring it behind art. Literally. Nice. No one’s the wiser.
Barney frowns at the drawing. Something about it doesn’t feel… tasteful, anymore. Not that it ever was but, god those tits. They looked like magic in real life. Now it’s like they could be up on a poster in some… other teenager’s bedroom. Or many teenagers. If this was a poster, it could go on the back of many a horny runt’s door. Is that fair to her?
The psychedelic colors seem noisy and childish now, too. The whale… why did he put her in front of a whale?! Jackie herself looks perfect, but less than herself. Diminished. It’s Jackie but it’s not, cause it could be any knockout to a certain extent. He’s such a child he drew Jackie’s body floating in a fever dream like she’s a space goddess? This… this is who he is?!
“Oopsie,” Barney mutters. More seriously this time. What would she think, seeing herself like this? Would she be… into it? Flattered? Horrified by the immaturity? Amused by the creativity?
When she gets home she’s going to ask, “Where are you?” And he’ll say, “In here.”
She’ll dropp her bag on the floor near the door and stomp in with her shoes. “Where?!” “Here.” “Oh. Hi.” “Hey.”
She’ll appear in the doorway. Her hair will be slightly wind-blown. Her cheeks will be pink from effort not embarrassment. She’ll look like his cosmic goddess and even better, just a regular woman. Maybe they’re all perfect?
“What were you up to?” she’ll ask, seeing the pencils all over the floor.
“Just… drawing.”
“Drawing what?”
Bright pink pencil still in his hand. Magenta.
“Nothing. Regular stuff.”
