I was about to be naked when I met Adri for the first time. I'd agreed to pose for a life-drawing class she led in the little studio behind a rare print shop in Washington DC. She hadn't hired me, the owner of the shop had.
I undressed behind a curtain, redundant, really considering that I would be spending the next two hours on display for a room full of strangers, but I felt more dignified unhooking my bra and stuffing my underwear into my handbag in private. Out I walked in the sort of one-size-fits-all kimono you might wear at the hairdresser's. The belt wrapped around my waist four times.
"You're a bit of a change," Adri said as she took the robe from my shoulders and arranged me on a chair. Her head gestured towards some charcoal sketches pinned to the walls. A thin older man with hollows where his muscles once were and an ample woman with thighs that filled the page had been the subjects of lessons one and two.
When we were in college together I hadn't really known Adri though, I had certainly known about her. She was a lightening rod for nasty gossip, largely because, I know now, she has never shown any remorse when her relationships ended or overlapped.
Adri had stayed in DC after graduation because she was having and affair with a professor I would gladly have gone to bed given the chance. Her wonderfully convoluted mix of vanity and personal morality demanded that she not even hint to him that she might be willing until after he'd handed in her final grade. Adri's natural recklessness gives some people the impression that she's less intelligent than she is. She has all of the confidence of money and beauty but still likes some reassurance about smart.
"Easy, but never sleazy," she told me.
Adri is easy; easy to get along with, easy to laugh and talk to. The way she moves, dresses, even the little pencil sketches she is constantly drawing are all effortless.
The seven students in the drawing class were affluent looking older woman and one salt and pepper haired man. Then there was Adri, long and angular with milk colored skin and butter colored hair. She said to speak up if I got too cold so she could turn the air conditioning down. She must have noticed that my nipples were as hard as dried peas.
Throughout the class we smiled at each other. This continued when we went for drinks afterwards and Adri told me about the house in the mountains she'd inherited from her Great Aunt. "I can't have it until August. My parents are clearing out everything valuable and taking it back to New York or Southampton. The roof needs fixing and I have to have a shower put in, but it's my favorite place. You'll come when it's finished?"
It took me weeks to realize we were flirting. I had never been attracted to a woman before.
Now, it was late summer, early morning. Manhattan was empty and smelled of bread and steam. Adri said she'd meet me outside my Aunt's building on Sunday, eight-ish and asked me to pick up some coffee for the drive upstate. I had two weeks to kill between the end of the lease on my apartment in Washington and leaving for grad school in London. I'd dodged a dull spell at home in Connecticut. We'd already had the family farewell dinner and my parents were now busy settling my twin younger sisters into their respective universities.
Adri was late but not as late as I expected her to be. She bounced out of the car, wet hair swinging, and the swirling hot air from a man hole blowing the skirt of her sundress up to her waist. She grabbed the coffee and took a long sip not bothering to worry if it was too hot. She's not cautious, Adri, not ever. By nine we were out of the city zipping up the Hudson Valley weaving and passing the few cars on the road with us.
Every time Adri drew her elbow back to shift gears the strap of her dress slid off her shoulder exposing her right breast.
The drive from Manhattan to the house should have taken two hours. I thought we'd make it in half that, if we lived, but when we pulled off the interstate Adri's driving calmed down. We stopped for groceries. Before we got out of the car Adri put her hand on my leg and pushed the hem of my skirt up to expose my thigh. She looked at me with an expression I couldn't quite decipher and said that she was glad that I was there.
Adri had spent the end of summer is this house for most of her life; packed off to her Great Aunt when her parents thought a dose mountain air would compensate for months of beachy decadence. The house was on land that had belonged to her family since New York was New Amsterdam. Adri has an old Dutch last name usually associated with libraries and museum wings. The house has a Dutch name too, the maiden name of the wife of the man who built it in the 1860's to save his family from the foul air of Manhattan summers; Naaktgeboren. The name means born naked. True enough.
We stopped for gas, then at a hardware store and a pharmacy all for things we didn't need. I had the impression that Adri was announcing her arrival.
I'd never been in this part of New York State before. Some of the towns we passed through seemed a little down at the heels. The mountains were certainly beautiful if not as impressive as Vermont's. There were the ghosts of hotels built when the railway first came a hundred years ago. Successful immigrants; mostly Germans, and a host of Eastern Europeans both Jewish and Christian, had constructed their own private worlds of foreign languages and food. It was a kitschy recreation of Bavaria and the Carpathian Mountains and the Vienna Woods; castles, chalets, onion domes. It looked like some weird life-sized model train set.
Many of the hotels had closed but a few hung on catering to the new flood of new immigrants from Eastern Europe.
Finally, Adri turned left into a dirt driveway with a chain across it. She unlocked the pad-lock and we drove strait up into the woods. At first there was no indication that there was a house there at all. Then, when the sun shone down through an opening in the trees, there was a second chain, a second lock and her magical little house appeared on the flat of the hill looking out over the valley. The house was as unlikely as anything we had passed that day. It was two floors high with four fluted columns holding up a pediment; a Greek temple in the woods.
Adri jumped out of the car and bent into a yoga stretch, hands down, her hard peach of an ass uncovered and high in the air, her heels flat on the ground. Adri is very flexible. She ran to unlock the front door pushed me inside and kissed me deeply.
I was sent off to have a look around while she unpacked the car. The house was grand but worn. Four rooms upstairs, four rooms downstairs opening off of two wide hallways. On the ground floor the hall floor boards showed the trace of having once been painted to look like a checkerboard of black and white marble. Adri's drawings were everywhere, mostly prettily framed nudes hung to camouflage the un-faded patches of wallpaper.
The first room upstairs had been turned into an enormous bathroom probably in the thirties from the look of the tiles. The huge tub projected into the room like big white sarcophagus. To the right here was a glass shower enclosure. When Adri had said she was having a shower installed, I didn't expect one big enough to wash the starting line-up of a basketball team all at once.
Only one of the three bedrooms looked lived in at all. Against the far wall there were rows and rows of books covered in those wrappers local businesses hand out at the start of the school year. Why? I wondered, as Adri had never been to a school that would have asked to have books handed in at the end of the year.
