When I told my parents I had become a figure model, at the age of twenty-two in southeast Ohio, they were proud of me and said I was handsome. Then I explained that it didn’t mean I was good-looking. It meant I was willing to take off my clothes for other people.

My transition to being a figure model from being no kind of model was quick. I saw flyers posted in town announcing a need for models, had a brief phone conversation with an art school secretary, and showed up at a recruitment meeting. So did three teenage women. I had to fill out an application that asked for a brief description of my body; I wrote that I had no tattoos and that I was covered with a thin layer of hair.

The recruiter, a polite, nervous man with tattoos on his arms and a thin layer of hair, wanted us to know what we were getting ourselves into. He explained what a typical art class would consist of: up to twenty students, a professor to give us instructions. We would, he emphasized, have to take off all our clothes, and when he said this I laughed. I didn’t know why. Wanting someone to laugh with me, I looked to the teenagers, but they were staring forward, looking unamused and terrified. I understood, then, that I might be the only one present who would have no problem undressing for others, that discussing this activity might make the women uneasy, that after a man tells some college students of the sex opposite mine that they will need to strip for money, their side of the room is the wrong place to point my gaze. I looked away.

When I arrived at the art classroom for the first time, and knew that in ten minutes I would be seen naked by a lot of people, my penis got smaller—smaller than it had been when I looked at myself naked in the mirror that morning, hoping to make a good impression. It was failing me at the moment I most wanted it to be itself. I wasn’t there to impress; I was there for money, but still I didn’t want to be misrepresented by the most important one of my imminently visible reproductive organs. It was as though my body were lying to people, and I couldn’t make it stop. I am unaware of an equivalent for this in women who model for artists, but I know they also get nervous, whether or not it has an outwardly notable effect on their anatomies.

I was expected to undress behind a partition in the corner. The momentary privacy it offered seemed absurd. I knew the same body that stripped behind it would soon be on its other side, in plain sight. Shielding my stages of nakedness from the eyes of others was done with a willful ignorance, I thought, of the fact that thirty of those eyes would be on me soon, and that their looks would be critical and unashamed.

I emerged from behind the partition, where in place of clothes I had wrapped a bathrobe around myself, with a belt. Students trickled into the room. They knew why I was there; they had never seen me before, and I wasn’t wearing shoes or clothes.

Soon I stood in my robe, in the center of the room, as the professor gave instructions to the students. Papers rustled. I untied my belt. I tried to make eye contact with someone, and as soon as I did I knew it was the wrong thing to do. The girl I chose to befriend in this way did not return my smile, but instead glanced nervously at everything that was not about to expose itself to her.

I didn’t know how to behave. I had never been in a circumstance like this, and I was never the focus of so much attention. I stood, surrounded, my heart pounding, and tried to act casual.

There is no established polite way to tell someone to remove his clothes, but I knew what the professor meant when he looked at my face and nodded. In a flash I was naked and cold, with my robe on the floor beside me. I kept my eyes pointed low, so as to not embarrass the students as they surveyed my body. Each one focused on my foot or my neck and ran a charcoal pencil across a page I could not see.

The work of figure modeling consists of poses. The model is always standing, sitting or sprawling out, in limb arrangements that are interesting to draw. I was asked, sometimes, to stand for an hour at a time, with infrequent breaks and joints that wanted to buckle. At other times I was asked to lie face down on a sheet for a solid hour, which meant I was being paid to do in public what I did at home for free.

The initial poses of a drawing session, though, are gesture poses. They are taken in quick succession and held no longer than a minute each; while they last, students must race to draw the whole model. To take these poses I had to make myself a unique mess of lines and dramatic contours. I had to twist and stretch my bone and muscle. I might begin by standing with arms stretched high, and neck arched back—then, a minute later, turn ninety degrees, double over and grab my knee with both hands. I never moved like this in other rooms and buildings.

I had to concentrate, so much that I could sometimes forget altogether the ones who watched me. Other times I was self-conscious and worried they might criticize my dry skin.

When gestures ended I was pouring sweat, and everyone could see it. My joints felt like nails were driven into them, but the good news was that soon I could sit in a longer, easier pose, or even recline for half an hour. I couldn’t help but relax and be thankful for the relief, even though I was still naked in front of a lot of strangers.

In an essay, James Baldwin mentions that as a young man he modeled at a New England artists’ colony. Claude McKay, Jamaican poet of the Harlem Renaissance, worked as a figure model in Paris. The rooms he appeared naked in were so cold that he contracted influenza. In his autobiographical novel Impossible Vacation, Spalding Gray’s protagonist models for an art class but is asked by someone in charge to wear a jockstrap.

In Human Smoke, Nicholson Baker quotes the diary of Mary Berg, an artist who lived in the Warsaw ghetto. She describes the young people who would wait in line to model for her art class, to be paid with bread. One of the models eats half of what she earned and saves the rest for her brother. This model is a hero, an intrepid breadwinner who rescues her loved one from starvation.

While I understood that I didn’t model to save anyone—least of all other people—I thought, privately, that since my work was daunting, by doing it I proved how brave I could be. I knew modeling wasn’t for everyone; I knew most people would be unwilling to do what I was doing on campus for about three hours each week. I felt that a nude model needs to be courageous and willing to do what most would never dare.

I was surprised, then, to learn from an artist friend that “People don’t really like figure models.” She explained, “Most people think they’re kind of dumb. And annoying.” She had overheard me telling someone about my job outside the classroom and had pulled me aside to give me this information.

I had heard art students complain about models. One told me about a woman who disrobed and spent a whole class complaining when she was supposed to be still and silent. I heard about a man my age who announced to a class that no one should be put off by his body, that they should talk to him if they felt like it, that he was ready to be friends with them, as he stood before them naked.

When I heard about these people, I thought they were exceptions, that on the whole figure models were upright, dutiful, serious people who didn’t feel inclined to tell their audiences how social they were. According to my friend, though, this was how she perceived most figure models, and it was how others saw me when I told them what I did for food money.

Still, I was convinced that my work was noble and good. I wasn’t being paid well enough really to justify the long hours of pain, of limbs fallen asleep and exposure of my most private parts. I modeled for the money, partly, but more to enable the students’ educations. I was doing it for them. I sacrificed hours of my life for strangers who needed a good man to draw, and I never doubted that each moment I spent perfectly still in the nude, acting like a thing that couldn’t talk or think, was worth it.

It was not lost on me, as I kept still for the strangers, that people do not typically direct their gazes at others the way the students pointed theirs at me. It would have been inappropriate to look at me with such intent and concentration at a restaurant or out in the hallway, but in the classroom my job was to invite the unabashed, incessant attention of everyone in the room. When I stripped off my robe, I forfeited whatever in other circumstances made my body off-limits to probing stares.

The sort of look my body absorbed in art classes was usually given not to people but to things. I often felt in the classroom that I should be made of plastic or wood rather than skin. I was not allowed to move or talk or otherwise bask in my sentience. I would struggle to keep my limbs in place, as my flesh, it turned out, wanted always to shift, to find an easier way to slump against the platform where I froze. My body’s effort to adjust itself and my constant breathing reminded me, and them, that I lived after all, but at the same time I had never behaved so much like my own inevitable corpse, or like a table or chair, or a mannequin.

Whenever I took the rare pose that didn’t hurt, I felt that I was becoming a part of the surface I rested on, another mute extension of the room. Minutes stretched into hours, so that it often seemed the pose would never end and I would be there for good, getting rendered indefinitely, in drawings without conclusions.

The drawing room had lots of real objects in it, like easels, chairs, metal poles I held for certain poses, wooden blocks the size of small art students—even a white, plastic mannequin. So long as I was posing, I acted like another of the room’s inanimate things. I breathed, and during long poses I shifted because of the pain in my legs or my back, but these were problems; they never added a charming human touch to my presence. The class had to contend with my need to be at ease. I aspired to behave as though I felt and thought nothing, to be more couch than man.

Of course, it would have been cheaper for the art school to forego hiring me and have students draw their mannequin, so the usefulness of drawing a body must have had something to do with this tension between its status as a living thing and its owner’s attempt to pretend otherwise. When I modeled I portrayed myself as lifeless, and it was the performance everyone drew. I acted like something that can’t feel pain or wonder how big the universe is; they rendered that fiction onto paper.

When I started modeling, I didn’t have a robe I could bring to work, so I had to buy one. At a department store I found a navy blue bathrobe that seemed ideal. There was no point judging it by whether it kept me warm or made me look strong, as I would wear it solely for its removal. I thought it would be a handsome thing to take off my body.

The bathrobe was made of thick cotton and was too big to fit into the backpack I carried. On a day when I modeled I walked around all day with the robe underneath one arm. No one ever asked why I had it with me.

One afternoon, after modeling all morning, I was having coffee at a little establishment with big windows. It was bad coffee, and I must have been distracted by how bad it was, because later that night, at home, I discovered I had misplaced my robe. I couldn’t think of where I had left it. A week later, in the same coffeehouse as before, I glanced up from my work to see the bathrobe hanging from a chair at a nearby table. It took me a second to recognize it, but there it was, my prodigal robe. I thought someone must have seen me leave it a week before and held onto it, then quietly placed it near me when she saw me return. I felt that I was being watched. It didn’t help that I had spent all morning in a drawing classroom, being watched, and copied onto paper.

After my first year as a figure model, I started appearing in John’s classroom. I had modeled for several art professors by then. One was tall and calm, with white hair and a moustache; another wore a beret and always played the same Herbie Hancock CD—“Cantaloupe Island” and other tunes—on a stereo. I appeared in John’s classes most often, though—usually once a week, sometimes twice. I earned hundreds of dollars from this. It was as pivotal to the effort to keep myself fed as it was detrimental to the well-being of my joints.

John had a lazy eye. Once, when a student accidentally drew my eyes as though they pointed in opposite directions, John pointed at me and told him, “His eyes aren’t like that. Mine are.” He was short and must have been just over thirty. He was loud. He was friendly to me when I first met him, but as soon as he introduced himself, as I stood in my bathrobe and waited to disrobe, he paced the room and shouted at his students. It was their first day drawing. He said, “I don’t want you in here if you’re here to fuck around with pencils.” He told them they were there to work, and as I watched their faces in an effort to avoid watching his I could tell they had not expected the tirade.

John made me nervous, but something in his military approach was reassuring. Clearly he took his job as seriously as I took mine; he saw the importance of what we were doing and wanted the students to comprehend it too. He put as much pressure on them as they put on me whenever they examined my limbs and torso, and I thought by drilling his students like this he might also be trying to frighten the ones who had signed up for the class just to see strangers take off their clothes.

One afternoon, John asked me to sign a release form, and at the end of class his students took turns photographing me. I didn’t get to see the photos they took of my naked body until I attended an art show months later. I had befriended some of the students by then, and they invited me to the show but didn’t tell me what it consisted of.

I was there for half an hour before I figured out that a student had cut images of me from several photos and pasted them onto his canvases, incorporating me as a part of his thesis project. I saw there was a man in some of his paintings, but I didn’t recognize him until I caught sight of a canvas in the corner, in which he had blown up and set in the background a face that I slowly understood was mine. First I recognized my eyes. Then I looked around and saw that I was on every frame, in various sizes and oddly posed, with arms stretched out, or knees bent. Someone told me, “Rob, I think you’re his muse.”

Something like that had happened before, when I first moved to Ohio. At the time, I wore a full beard. Then, on the first morning I woke in my one-bedroom apartment, my beard felt suddenly wrong. No one in town knew me, and I wanted the people to see me as I really was, without this extra hair on my skin. I scraped it off with a razor.

I hadn’t seen my beardless face for months, and I no longer recognized it. Once the hair was gone, from my eyes to my neck I was a stranger. I thought I looked like a woman. I saw, at last, what others must see when they see my face for the first time. I had never felt so out of place in my own skin, and I didn’t recover from the estrangement for days.

Figure modeling reproduced this effect, in a subtle way, every time I did it. Standing, sitting, or sprawling there at the center of the room, my image was grafted onto more than a dozen sheets of paper, simultaneously. Some renditions were faithful, but in some sketches I didn’t look like me at all, and if one judged by the content on the pages I could have been anyone up there. I wanted to come across unmistakably—as though my image, drawn by someone else, could be my signature. I wanted to be definite, but the artists showed me that I could be split into pieces and parceled out ad infinitum.

Some students drew badly. In a memorable sketch, my torso appeared to be one foot longer than it really was. I looked inhumanly skinny, like a naked cartoon.

Once when I modeled for a graduate class, a student drew me in a way that compelled the others to creep behind her easel and snicker, until the professor joined them, burst into guffaws, and said, “You misjudged the proportions a little there.” The artist looked at me, sheepishly, over and over. She was stationed in my line of sight. No one told me what was funny, but they left me enough clues to figure out that she had exaggerated my penis to where it looked an absurd, unreasonable size.

Some students, on the other hand, were excellent artists who depicted my body with horrific accuracy. Once, a student behind me rendered some loose fat I had not realized I wore just above my hips. She had made plain my unsightly extra skin, one of my unknown flaws, and had failed to depict me the way I envisioned myself. I stood in my robe through the five-minute break and squeezed my lower back to confirm her appraisal. She had drawn my imperfection with merciless perfection.

I was often surprised by how calm I looked in drawings, though, even when I came out looking fat. I was always staring forward, mouth shut, no anxious concern in my eyes. Even on a day when I was stressed out, in two dimensions I looked placid, or even overcome by a sense of well-being.

In the occasional seated pose, my foot would fall asleep and turn purple. Once, I spent thirty minutes with my face buried in my folded arms, and for some reason I started gagging. Some poses were more relaxing than others, but the case was rare that I could stay in one for twenty minutes and not come out of it in pain.

My worst suffering as a model, though, occurred apart from my ankles and knees. The moment was far worse in which I discovered that my daily life consisted of sequential chunks of time spent doing unpaid model work. Whatever crossed my mind in the classroom would cling to me after I dressed and went home. The backache I acquired there returned to me when I sat, silent, among friends. Miles from the drawing classroom, I would sit immobile for ten minutes, because people behave that way, in the car, or in a waiting room. For a few long moments, at home, I would sit still with an avocado sandwich in my hand, and discover that although I had no audience and I was in clothes, I had essentially just been posing without compensation.

When gesture poses ended, the students would pick one sketch to turn in for a grade, but the rest of their work they disposed of. I would stand in my robe, catching my breath and sweating from gestures, as a roomful of people took down their drawings, crushed them to handfuls of so much paper, and threw them in the trash. Once I considered asking if I could keep some of the drawings, but then I thought of what a vain impulse that would seem to be.

Acquaintances were always surprised to find out I was a figure model. “And you’re so shy,” they would say, incredulous. I wanted to tell them what it felt like to expose my body to others. I wanted to describe the tension in the classroom at the start of a class, the apprehension of the students. I had stories ready.

I had thought my job would yield infinite conversation, myself at its center always. I found, though, that when I told a modeling story someone would steal the focus back from me. Friends would tell their own jokes, saying, “If I ever tried to be a nude model I’d think about girls and get excited,” or, “I bet more people have still seen me naked than you.” They talked about modeling as they drew attention from the only one present who had done it. I became secondary to their opinions, to their surprise at what a low wage I earned, and the conversations escaped me.

A student once drew me for forty minutes as I sat for her class, but rather than take her drawing home she left it behind. Each time I returned to the room I saw her image of me on an abused sheet of paper, bunched up in the corner where no one else noticed. After a while I saw it on the floor under the sink, and it stayed there for months. Every time I modeled, I told myself I should retrieve the drawing after everyone left and take it home with me, but I never did. Someone else finally threw it away.