“The Time Of Heroes” by Paul Silverman
--page 4

         Today she had stitched next to nothing, but it was as much sewing as she could take. All the magic and promise was radiating from the computer, and she opened it like a banshee. She sat on tenterhooks while the screen filled, suffering the drone of the log-on process as though it were the grinding of centuries. The instant the buzzing stopped she opened her email, and there it was in the inbox, TMWFT re:today. He would stop by her place mid-afternoon, he accepted her financial offer, he would pose or be fitted, be sketched or photographed. He concluded, with an e-smile, that he was ready, willing and able to become the poster boy for Narcissus. Reading it, Alessandra’s head swam, as though the scent of the model was seeping through the emoticon and enveloping her.
         And then it was there, really there, a dense cloud of it, as she opened her apartment door and let him in. The aura of him deepened and sharpened as he stripped down in the scant clearing of floor between the dress forms, fabric bolts and the racks of half-sewn garments. Once again he wore a cup and a thong, nothing else. Once again, the thong was blue. Alessandra wondered if it was the same thong as before, and the thought that it probably was - a live link to the day in the museum - hit her like a shot of absinthe, the banned lethal kind, dripping desire. She had to stand guard over every word that came out of her lips, to keep her real feelings from blowing the business façade to smithereens.
         She showed him swatches and color samples and scribbled a few impressions on a sketch pad, just to give him a sense that there was a palette and a concept or two behind what they were doing. Today would be brainstorming, she said, just trying things. And then she asked him to stand with both arms raised and bent at the elbows, hands pressing the sides of his hair, as though he had just come up from the ocean or the bottom of a pool, soaking wet. He laughed and asked if that meant he was Narcissus, in which case he would be staring back at the pool, or a mer-man, in which case he would look wonder-struck finding himself in a world without water.
         Alessandra seized the opportunity and said if he were a mer-man, and maybe even Narcissus too, he wouldn’t be wearing a mass-produced thong with a piece of athletic equipment stuck inside it. To say what she said was such a leap it made her sweat all over - but to hear her say it made Tom sweat even more. The windows of the room were shut tight and the thermostat was high, set that way on purpose by Alessandra, and now she had the exact moment she had wanted, the sense of being locked in a terrarium with some tropical man-plant, so pungent he had her in near delirium, and in the very next moment she would watch him step out of the thong...
         He started to lower it - but suddenly he balked and hitched it back up. What she had caught at the museum, that strip-club bravado, it seemed to drain out of his face and even his limbs, just like that, dulling the skin tone.
         This isn’t a class full of students, she said. It’s just me, it’s just us. What’s wrong?
         But all he did was stand there, muscles and sinews frozen, haunches stalled like a horse spooked by a wolf howl. She felt the air change, become drier and cooler. Whatever it was that seized him was like a frost creeping onto his skin, killing the spicy sheen, and the ambrosia with it.

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