Portrait of a Man as an Oscar-Nominated Actor

Elif Sinem Erdem

On the day of his sitting — that Wednesday at 9am — the actor knocked on her studio door as soon as her grandfather clock struck a note. She initially didn’t hear it well, thought that one of her canvases had knocked down the other, when she heard it again: a brief, brusque burst of knuckle against wood. Damla hesitated for a moment. Reminded herself of his name, the fact that he was from New York City like her father, and that, no matter how good-looking and/or Turkish he was, he was still a moving, living subject, a human. (She reminded herself also that life drawing had been her absolute least favorite class and quickly dismissed it.) She tried to prepare herself for some kind of morning grumpiness on his end, as was common with many of her clients, as well. Nobody liked to get to work this early. 

Sure enough, he didn’t smile, but he didn’t seem groggy or upset to be awake. He wore a black cap that matched with the rest of his pitch-black outfit, but cocked his jaw despite the fact he was a head taller than her so their eyes met. His was the green of grass in summer. She felt equally appreciated and repulsed by this gesture. She noted, too, that he had come alone. 

“Pleased to meet you,” Damla said. “Come in.” 

He greeted her in Turkish and dutifully took off his shoes without having to be reminded of it. He walked inside with a cursory look around, steps slow as if to ascertain where the living room was, if she even had that sort of thing. She seemed so baffled he would walk so slow, that he was this tall — lanky to the point of seeming reedy — that only when he turned around did she remember she was the host and he, therefore, a guest. He’d taken off his cap. His hair was pitch-black, parted in the middle, his lips a shade of red. She immediately thought of Snow White. 

“Coffee? Water?” she asked. “I have toast too.” 

“Water’s fine,” he answered in a thick New Yorker accent. 

When she emerged from the kitchen with a glass of cold water, he’d sat down on the couch, legs spread the way only men seemed comfortable to, hands resting between them, as he looked at the walls, the canvases. She’d spent the past day cleaning up, though it was far from the spotless surfaces that she saw other people, other celebrities, sport. She’d always chalked it up to the fact they didn’t quite live there, that it was as much decorative space as any other, a hotel they didn’t have to pay for. The actor didn’t seem necessarily bothered by the odd brush or pencil laying there, and if he was interested in the stacks of paper and palettes that she’d hurriedly tossed near the radiator, then he didn’t inspect them any closer. She felt an odd sensation crawl up her skin, one that very quickly revealed itself as a coil of anxiety. She hated being watched. She hated that he was there. Why couldn’t he just accept whatever she’d draw of him for the magazine? She hated that she couldn’t peer into his thoughts and ascertain what he thought of her, what he thought he knew of this house, without her having to ask. 

He took the glass of water with a small thanks, but left it on the table. He turned his attention to her, but never looked down at her outfit, nor anywhere else on her face besides her eyes. It was so intense she turned her attention to the rings he sported on his fingers, four on each hand. Two on each ringfinger, one on the middle finger, one on the index finger. He smoothed over them absently, then — likely because she noticed — tented his fingers. A breath out, one Damla immediately registered as amused but expectant. The silver complimented the black nicely. Probably he’d been dressed by his stylist at an ungodly hour just so he could arrive here. Nothing about his face, his hair, or his clothes stood out of line. It seemed like so much preparation just for an off-camera meeting between two artists, or an artist and whatever he considered himself as. 

She met his gaze again. She hadn’t seen his movies, not even the one he got nominated for. But she’d seen him on her feed often enough. He looked intense in every picture. As if he knew if he let up, the camera would find out something about him he didn’t want to know. It wasn’t quite the same here, right now. Vedat Karabulut, actor, Turkish-American, New York City: he knew that this was what she knew about him, maybe even sensed that this was all that she wanted to know about him for now, and therefore looked a little looser. In turn, he knew nothing of her besides her art. He had no idea that there were dozens of little Vedats at the back of the calendar. She felt another coil of anxiety in her stomach at the sheer idea. 

He smiled just then. The intensity was immediately broken, replaced by a perfectly fabricated Hollywood smile, pearly white teeth and machinesque gorgeousness. “I hope I didn’t make you uncomfortable,” he said. “I attended your show at the MoMA. Real impressive stuff that you did. But you left rather early. No chance to talk to you in person.” 

Her first show had featured Cruz. She’d called it that, too: “Cruz_roads”, a sort of exorcism of her past to make way for her future. Oil on canvas, once her mother’s métier, now the only way she could express what she felt inside. That had been over three years ago. The attention the exhibit had attracted had left her in the restroom after a first bout of questions and picture posing, to a mental map of all the emergency exits, one of which she’d wound up taking into a brutally cold night wind. 

“Is this an interview?” Damla asked. 

“Oh, no.” He laughed: pearly, cleanly divided ha ha has. Only here did she immediately lose all association with the face she’d drawn so often the past few days and would come to draw a lot more in the coming ones. This felt practiced as though he’d drawn from the same rulebook of social etiquette that Damla had spent observing for the better part of her life. “It is a request.” 

She sat down then, feeling her feet thank her for the sudden lack of pressure. “I was asked to use digital for your profile,” she said. 

“I’m sure you were.” 

He crossed his legs and rested his hands on his knees, as though he wanted her to take a picture of him right now and make a portrait of it. But how to account for whatever she felt here? Her teenage idol, John Singer Sargent, hadn’t rendered his subjects as though they were artificial. Rather, they were rendered artificial by the choice of being portraited, by Sargent’s remote style. It wasn’t Damla’s style, had stopped being that for years. The sensation that Vedat, right now, gave her, was one she couldn’t immediately parse. It would be intriguing if it wasn’t for the fact that his gaze and smile both were smug. It told her he knew he had her attention, was flattered by it, and wanted something from it in return. 

“My studio’s over here,” Damla said, pointing at the door behind Vedat. She was proud of herself for not sounding annoyed. “Do you prefer to sit or stand?” 

“Whatever you prefer me to do.” He took a sip from his glass, his eyes briefly fluttering shut. Even this seemed like he was performing a water advertisement for an invisible camera. He caught her looking and smiled. “Your portrait of your mother was quite the achievement. Did she sit for you?” 

“No.” 

“Something new for both of us then.” His hand reached over to his shirt, a finger caressing the hem only to claw in. “I am totally comfortable with—” 

“I do not need to—” She quickly felt her whole face heat up, and with the heat she felt annoyance rise in her, as well. He raised his eyebrows and she realized what the problem was. It wasn’t the he wanted a portrait of himself and seemed overly content to let her take the reins. It was the face that bothered her. The sharp gaze, the perfect split of his black hair, and the equally, perfectly-constructed, perfectly Hollywood features. The fact that such a face could be real in the first place. “You have no reason to bring up my mother here.” 

That and the fact he made sounds. Any kind of them. He was chuckling now. 

“I thought I’d myself clear, but maybe not. So to be clear,” Vedat said. “I do not want to have a portrait for myself. That is not what I’m here for.” 

She turned to his hands. They were tented again, but no fiddling took place.

“So what’s the request?” 

He didn’t answer straightaway. He waited for so long, in fact, that Damla turned to his gaze. As soon as she did, he spoke — there was no delay there. “Feature on your next exhibit.” 

The smile he gave her was not smug, but it was self-assured. He leaned back, turning to the sunlight streaking from the window and leaving bright white spots on the parquet floor, and then to her as if she’d just said something particularly amusing or flattering towards him. 

“You think I’ll feature you just because you ask me to?” she asked. 

His hands lifted briefly from the couch. “You don’t give interviews. Nothing you say indicates whatever you’ll do next. I saw you do portrait work on Instagram. Good as try as any to get my shot in. And your painting with your mother… it is remarkable. I mean — the fact you drew this without her sitting for you?” 

Portrait of a woman. A late addition, the last addition, to the exhibit. She hadn’t been sure of it, but the curator had insisted on its appearance. It had drawn the most spectators, or so Damla had been told. It centered the place, she’d been told. She didn’t want anything to center her work anymore. Better to go off in a few directions, to leave a vague, nebulous space. How was she going to do that with this face? 

“There is an allure,” he continued, “to painting somebody like me. Status, I imagine, is one of them.” 

“For me or for you?” 

His mouth pealed: again, that ha ha ha. “For both of us! You know how many photographers would kill to have a session with me?”

She didn’t care, though this she didn’t say out loud. He wasn’t quite convincing her, hadn’t said anything that engaged her artistic side, but as she focused her gaze to below his face, where his hand still ran along his hem, she noticed that the black, normally an absorbing color, seemed to account for some space in his chest. It wasn’t merely to thin him out, or if it was, it went to such an extreme that it resembled a black hole, something into nowhere. 

“Is that the wrong thing to say to bohemians?” he asked. “Am I supposed to talk about authenticity? Give you this spiel about how I really, really want to have my painting taken by you, because we are both Turkish? For what it’s worth, I do think your painting of your mother—” 

“Take off your shirt,” Damla said. 

He paused but only for the briefest moment. “So you do want me naked,” he said.

“Just shirtless.” 

He didn’t find this funny, or at least not as funny as whatever she said earlier. When he smiled, the smugness had disappeared. “A little basic, no?” he asked. 

“How can you know if it’s basic if I don’t even know what will happen?” 

“You don’t know?” 

“I don’t know what’s going to happen,” she said. “I saw something. It might translate. It might not. We will find out together.” 

He hummed. “While I’m bare-chested.” 

“Yes.”

“A metaphor for baring my heart to you?” 

“This isn’t about you.” 

“I’m so glad,” he said with a tone that neither suggested sincerity or its opposite.

“Come in when you’re done undressing.” 

She left him to privacy and entered the studio, looking for a wooden chair for him to sit on. When he emerged, in what felt like an overly exaggerated five minutes later — his chest and back were both cleanly shaven and bereft of tattoos — she gestured him to straddle the chair and made him face the rug on the wall. The rug, which had been a gift from her mother’s side of the family, was kept in clean blues and reds. It was a little rugged, and Vedat looked at its frayed ends on top with some amusement. Coupled with the word he’d used — bohemian — she could sense what he thought of her, what he assumed her to be. She didn’t deign this a response. 

“Is there anything else you want me to do?” Vedat asked. 

“Try not to speak,” she said. “You can sit however you want.” 

He sat up straight and drew his shoulders back. He drew a very small breath and kept his neck straight. He stared at the rug with a near-empty gaze: not at it or through it, but as though he was a doll that Damla had just put there. She felt an itch in her hands. She felt the urge to draw him whenever their eyes didn’t meet. And now that he was silent — he didn’t seem in any rush to say something, or at least it didn’t charge his body language — she could regard him without the unnecessary baggage that was the human personality. Briefly she considered capturing this exact gaze on camera. But that seemed the simple route, and it would have led to the same effect as the last exhibit. The idea that humans needed other humans to anchor their emotions on, or make sense of the world around them. If they did need humans, she thought, best to give them a distortion thereof. 

She took a deep breath on her own. 

She grabbed her camera. His eyes widened a little in surprise, and there was a flash of his teeth as he huffed out a laugh. The light came in just right, though the ideal spot was a few inches from where he sat. Once she adjusted him, she regarded him through the lens. His back, to be precise. His back, the center of it, was too well-lit. She asked him to move a little forward again, but didn’t like the way the shadow fell on his arm. But drawing any closer meant to cede him more space. The black hole that she had seen, she felt, needed only a small diameter to show its full intensity. Already, thoughts failed her. She was approaching a territory that she liked. Instead, she asked him to turn the chair ninety degrees so that she took a picture of him with the sunlight streaking in from the window, with her own body acting as a sort of shadow over the whole of her back. Vedat took all of this rather obediently. He was more than likely used to it. She had expected him to speak, or huff, anything to annoy her, but he seemed serious about the request he had. 

She pressed the shutter. It was the only sound in the room for that moment. 

He was shifting a little — model instincts expecting minutiae to deliver her a sample that she could then sift to a best-of — and she, in lieu of disrupting the silence any more than she ought to, shushed him. She took another picture, noted the way that his back stood out, and thought of angels, of the notion of an angel, heavenly creatures that humans foolishly mapped their own bodies onto when angels were not always necessarily human, or even humanoid. And she thought of the black hole she’d seen in his chest, or a hint of it, an inkling. The way it was a hole, or maybe a cave. A well, even.

“Lean forward,” she said. 

He leaned his heard forward first. From her vantage point, she was able to capture the shadow falling ever so slightly on his left side, the way each spinal disc had a soft accentuation where her camera’s shadow added to her body enveloping him in a slight darkness. She didn’t want to disrupt the silence again, only wanted to hear their breaths and the shutter of the lens, so she put a hand on his back — a little cold for the season; she ought to make tea for him later — and he leaned his head to the chair rest, drawing his shoulders close to himself. Now all the spinal discs were visible. She took those pictures too: close-up, then a little afar. 

“Sit on the ground,” she said, and the itch that she’s felt in her hands washed over the whole of her body; she almost wanted to knock out the chair from under him, he was moving too slow for her, far too slow; she forced herself a deep breath out. She couldn’t afford to lose a professional relationship so early. He had been right about that. He might be used to it, they might not be close, but she didn’t want to happen what had happened with Stella. Then, too, she’d asked her to strip down only to her chest. Then as now, Damla had asked her model to sit on a parquet floor. 

She might have breathed too loud, because when Vedat sat down, he briefly glanced at her. It was a look of brief, professional concern. 

“I’ll be alright,” she said. “Are you cold?” 

“Not unless you want me to strip down my pants as well.” 

“Not for now.” 

He smiled. “Now I know why you want me to be quiet.”

She did laugh then. It was not the same situation as then. He had not felt like he was rushed, or like he was suffocating by her gaze. When he sat down with his legs stretched out, he looked like a young man living out a childhood memory, his feet swaying in a wind that wasn’t here. 

He was watching her with that same concern one that didn’t pry and didn’t seem to bank on anything. This was professional, she told herself, but didn’t quite feel it until she lifted her camera and he immediately glanced down. He was not going to end this with a screaming match. He was not going to say anything unsavory. He had come here. He had wanted this. 

She found, as she took his body in profile, that so did she. 

“Strip down,” she said. 

He did. He gave her a glance as if to ask if his underpants were involved, and she nodded. He gave them a proper pull and kept his legs closed as she safely put them on top of the chair. That one she moved back to its original position. She heard him take a shuddering breath. But it was followed with that readying, small breath, and with it a loss of control. He was giving it to her. 

She didn’t have to ask him to draw his knees, or for him to rest his hands there. The pose was altogether more open than Young Male Nude Seated Beside the Sea, but Damla thought of it as she pressed the shutter. And she sensed that he knew the reference, as well. She hadn’t asked him what had led him to art, or how he’d come to see the exhibit. It had felt like an avenue for more flattery — and that you did it without her! —and she hadn’t wanted his flattery, or anyone else’s, now or ever. If they left this space, he would snap right back to that mode. But if he spoke here, where they had established something that they worked on together, him under her guidance, then it would be irrevocably lost. 

It was in the air somehow, in the silence only disrupted by breaths and shutters. It made a cavern in his chest, a dark spot he thought only he could see, one that the camera revealed. 

“Look at me,” she heard herself say. 

He didn’t fully turn to her. It was a brief glance, but the shutter swallowed it up greedily. 

She nearly dropped the camera in that moment. He looked up for good, the focus broken, as she quickly tried to grab the camera that was falling down. When she did, her heart was pounding. Her whole body had snapped to attention as though she’d touched a livewire. She put the camera down. She handed him his things — not exactly in a haphazard toss, but not quite in a tidy handover, either. He didn’t respond, merely taking her in. The intensity in his gaze was gone, replaced by something duller, like he’d been lulled into a mode that he was reluctant to wake up from. 

“I’m not uncomfortable,” he murmured. 

“I’ll see you in the kitchen,” she said. It was a conversational tone, but was so loud she felt herself flinch. 

It took her a minute to compose herself in the restroom. She knew that he wasn’t uncomfortable. She knew that he could keep going. What she didn’t know was if he knew what the camera had just taken. She hadn’t had this sensation before. She’d felt the camera become an animal, a magic object that could capture somebody’s soul, but it had been a floating, unreal thing, more in her thoughts than in reality. Never before had it felt this acute. She had found out something that he didn’t want anyone to know. She’d found the thing he had dared any camera up until this point to find, and now that hers did, it felt like foul play. Even on canvas, it would look like he kept a secret that she’d found out. And once in an exhibit, she would be unable to keep his secret. Not that two people ever could, but being seen by tens of thousands of people was too much. 

But he insisted, a voice in her said. He wanted this. And it made sense, with her other work. The ones solely based on emotion. The inner life of a man in pure black. Rothko-esque, the final Rothkos, in fact. That spark of green, right in the middle, or a little over the middle, where the eyes would be. A sliver of a life, or the hint of a dare, she wasn’t sure. 

But that, too, felt invasive. And yet he insisted. 

It took Vedat some time to emerge from the kitchen. Though he had his shirt on again, the smell of tobacco wafted from him. He was still far from the cocky actor that had strut into her apartment — she thought it had been less than an hour, but the sun had risen high enough for it to be closer to noon by now. Vedat didn’t seem as surprised by the time passing. He didn’t seem much of anything, merely a tall, lanky man who looked a little exhausted, if not physically then emotionally. The smile he gave her was small and soft. He didn’t speak until Damla handed him his cup of tea. 

“Quite blank, isn’t it,” he said. “I’ve been meaning to get a tattoo.” He was looking for something in her eyes that was unpretentious and unadorned. “But I can’t quite decide on a motif. Might as well get myself angel wings on, I suppose.” 

“That’s a little basic,” Damla answered. She sipped on her own tea. 

He chuckled, his eyes briefly closing in turn. “It would be a little solipsistic, yeah.”

“Not the problem here.”

He laughed for good, a surprised sound escaping his mouth, far from the peal of laughter he’d put on, closer to auditory chaos. She had to smile, too. It was always easier to be on the defense. Easy to needle somebody to keep them on the distance. She needed this now more than ever. Needle him until he was the actor that had walked in and demanded to be painted and not a young man haunted by something that threatened to take over the whole of his body, poked out from his vertebrae. 

Vedat didn’t seem to suspect anything. He continued to chat lightly with her about his previous decisions on tattoo placements, on how he’d briefly even considered Study of a woman on his left arm until he wondered if that would cut his chances at more roles. He talked about them, too, about casting and decisions made that had nothing to do with talent and everything to do with names and Instagram followers. He leaned against the counter as if it was his, as if they were friends, and more and more she watched the intensity return to his eyes. He was waiting for her to do something, here, to say something about herself in turn, but by the time she felt like she could tell him something, he had to go — some interview downtown — and he thanked her for her time. He was serious about it, she could tell, and felt satisfaction that she could tell now. She thanked him for being a good model. What she didn’t say, what Vedat didn’t say, was that it had been something neither of them had ever felt to that extent before. Something close to a sanctuary, at least up until Damla had stolen it from him. 

“I can come by some other time if you want to take pictures of my face,” he said. “For the job.” 

“I’ll let you know,” she said. 

“Better if you let my agent know.”

They grinned. Then finally, he put his cap on, and it was the same cold, intense stare that had greeted Damla two hours ago. His shirt hung loosely on his back. Shadows licked at his sleeves, his hem, but he didn’t seem to mind. 

Damla wasn’t one to speak. She felt that her silences had always said the most about her. By the time she had to speak, her throat had gone a little hoarse. Her agent wanted to know how their meeting had gone, if they had any selfies, if she could briefly let her know what her progress was on anything — spots for exhibits were filling up quick and her own fame was fading at the same rapid rate. The sun had travelled east to west. She’d worked on a new canvas and a new painting, had only just gotten started on painting a layer of black after circling the canvas at least fifty times, trying to ascertain the colored layers. She still saw the sketch she’d made with the film negative as her reference. The body would soon be hidden by the black, and only one sliver, a vertical right across his heart, in that cavern, would be mixed in a green the shade of grass in summer. And the blue one, a distance away from where his feet ended, something just out of reach, a source of comfort, a secret nobody could solve. Already, she knew that this would center her exhibit. Become an anchor point for the same reason her mother had been, but this time, nobody would quite know why. 

“He didn’t show up,” she said finally. “I think he had a photoshoot or something.”