I open my eyes. I close them. Shit. Goddamned sunshine. I squint and gaze at the blurry moving object before my eyes. Wavering pale ankles. Long legs that keep extending. And blooming buttocks … Fuck! Let me see the whole you. My head is splitting apart. The woman is facing the window askew; her brassiere is wrapped around her waistline, full with two lovely rolls. She closes the hooks, turns the bra around, and pulls it up to her breasts—her round, full, warm breasts. Her face is hidden by her bushy hair. Turn toward me. Hold me! Kiss me!

Throughout my life I’ve seen countless naked women’s bodies. Beautiful ones. Well, to be specific, I’ve seen hundreds of paintings of women’s nudes. From Botticelli to Courbet to Dali, all their female nudes. I’ve seen them all. Realism, Surrealism, the year of completion, blah blah blah, I don’t really care. I just liked the ones reprinted in high resolution. One day in the corner of the silent library, I put my tongue on the print of L’Origine du Monde. When I did that, it felt like my body turned into wet foam, curling into itself, sucked into that hole—leaving this filthy, noisy world, its pop quizzes and minimum wage.

This live nude painting—here and now—is sensual in her toasty peach-fuzz. “I would never have taken up painting if God didn’t give women breasts in such marvelous ways.” I recall Renoir said something like that, then painted his life away. I probably indulge in women’s nudes as much as he did. It doesn’t really matter whether I see the marvel of the cosmos or merely a voyeur’s object.

The plaster casts for fine arts students that stood along my high school’s corridor were always mottled in graffiti and dirt. As a member of the Fine Arts Club, I was in charge of cleaning them. It was an endless cycle: if I erased the beard off one face the night before, the very next morning a crotch would be covered in pubic hair, a chest covered with twenty nipples. “Lowbrows, they just don’t get art,” muttered the art teacher. He tenderly held the Venus he had sculpted himself, and sleazily slow danced his way into the art room. He shrouded her in a white veil, placed her in the corner of the drawing room, and then told me to lock the door behind me and to make sure to check the lock before I left.