A Division of the Light (18 page)

And yet here in this pale, hushed room, with her bare feet testing the weave of the sheets, the air infected by smells of paint, the sun warm by the opened windows, Alice wanted to intrigue and excite the man who was about to take her photograph. Gregory Pharaoh was her object and her victim, and she wanted him overtaken by fascination and lust. She needed to see this abstracted, overconfident man made awkward by desire, to hear his voice dry like a husk within his throat. She wanted him to stumble, and she wanted him to glow.

“I'll stand over here,” she said, walking to the window so that her back was to the lens.

“I decide the shots,” he told her.

“Then maybe you should decide on this one.”

On a low hill in the distance cloud was building. Alice unfastened the robe and let it fall open as she looked across the gardens. The sun was hot on the exposed vertical strip of her skin, and her breasts tingled slightly. She stood at the window as aloof and as unabashed as a Surrealist muse. If anyone had been walking in the grounds they could have looked up and seen her, but no one did. At her back there was silence. The shutter did not click. Power surged within her like a tide.

“Do you want me to turn so that you can see me?” she asked.

“Yes,” Gregory said.

A corona of sunlight flaring about her, the sides of the white robe framing the length of her body like shutters, Alice turned to face Gregory. She remembered what he had said about the geometry of the female form. And she knew that for the length of that bright afternoon, in this quiet cocoon of a hotel room, she was being captured, fixed, immortalized.

Gregory had his camera lined up, but he did not take the shot. Alice waited. She wanted him so consumed with excitement that his limbs would be drained of their strength. If at that moment he had fallen on his knees in front of her then she would have stopped forward to stand with her pubis only inches from his face.

“Do you think this pose is good?” she asked, challenging him with her gaze.

“No. It's too much like a glamour shot. It's not what I want.”

“Then what
do
you want?”

“Honesty,” he said.

Gregory could not help but remember how once, years ago, he and his wife had been staying at an expensive continental hotel in a room facing into the sun. Ruth had stood at the
bathroom door, fresh from a shower, a white toweling robe open down the front of her body, the room behind her bathed in light. They had been married for years, had made love hundreds of times, and yet Gregory had found himself so overcome with tender passion that at that moment he wanted to be nowhere else. His wife's body, her companionship, her very nature were so comforting that the rest of the world, and all other women, were made insubstantial.

He cleared his throat. “I think if we begin with you standing over there, behind that couch.”

“Why there?”

“Because its shape and the folds in the cloth and the spots of paint will act as counterpoints. Just accept that I know instinctively what will work. I can't explain myself all the time.”

Alice waited for a moment before walking to the couch. “Should I take this off?”

“That's the idea. When you have, put your fingers on the back of the couch, as if you were resting them on piano keys, and look straight into the lens.”

“This back is too low.” She gestured downward with one hand. “My body hair will be in shot.”

“I know.”

Alice waited for a moment, imagining how she would look, and then eased the robe from her shoulders and threw it to one side. As soon as she had done so she wondered if she should have trimmed her pubic hair. Actresses and models did that, and yet all of her lovers had been excited by it and begged her to keep it as it was; often her drama lecturer had teased it with a brush prior to making love.

Afterward the lecturer would lie beside her, sated and dreamy,
and rather than ask Alice about her own feelings, he would talk about his work, about stagecraft, acting techniques and pretense. He knew all about pretense; he was married to an actress who was often away on tour or on location, and whom he had no intention of leaving. Alice was happy with that; she had not wanted anything permanent. Later she came to recognize his monologues as tutorials, and as examples of his self-centeredness, but to begin with she had been fascinated by what he said. The personality, it seemed, was not fixed at all, but was malleable and more subject to change than Alice had suspected. Perhaps her own self, too, could undergo a transformation.

“Is that all right?” she asked Gregory.

“I'll tell you when it's not,” he answered, running off several shots. With each one Alice appeared to relax further and then to grow more confident.

“If you would stand to one side,” he requested.

She came out from behind the couch. There was nothing between her body and the lens. Her pubic hair was a shock of russet against the pale skin. Gregory was on the edge of arousal, and at the same time he felt guilty. He cleared his throat.

“Put your right hand on the couch back again. That's it. Use it to keep your balance if necessary. Now, put your other hand behind you so that it rests at the base of your spine. Good. And your right foot behind your left, and lift your body a little from the floor. Like a dancer. Great—that's great.”

“It would be easier if I was wearing heels.”

“But I wouldn't get the natural weight distribution that I want. And besides, I'm not Helmut Newton.”

Gregory had a twinge of guilt that shaded into a feeling of protection. He was not certain that Alice knew exactly what she
was doing in this wide, unhelpful world. He suspected that although she had had several lovers, she had become too involved, too dependent. He thought that each one must have broken her heart in ways that she would never speak about. Only Ruth had ever broken Gregory's. She had not intended to. She would never have anticipated the way that he had been unable to recover from her death.

“Standing like this is uncomfortable,” Alice said.

“OK, that will be fine. Take it easy and relax.”

As she did he noticed two things. Firstly that, rather than stand with her legs too closely together, she kept them very slightly apart. And then Gregory also noticed that there was a crooked blue line raised on the skin at the inside of one thigh, just above the knee. Alice saw him register the vein.

“I never said I was perfect.”

“There's no such thing as perfection. And who would want that?”

“I thought of having an operation. They say it's easy. It'll show on the photographs, won't it? People will say ‘Look, that woman has a varicose vein.'”

“If you cared about that, then you wouldn't have volunteered.” And then, after a pause, Gregory chanced a further question. “
Has
anyone ever said that to you?”

“Any men, you mean? I don't know. I can't remember.”

She knew he recognized that she was lying.

Besotted by intimacy, Alice had once shared a bathroom with a man who had insisted on knowing all of her body, and expected her to know all of his. When she had shaved his chin she had been so inexpert that excess foam from the razor had covered her fingers and dribbled on her naked belly. When her partner
bent to wipe it away with a towel he noticed the vein for the first time, and traced it with his finger as if it had been something distinctive and precious.

He was a physicist, and during the time that they lived together he had taken her to parties where he and his university colleagues had bandied undefined words like “hadron” and “quark” and phrases such as “quantum vacuum” and “the Copenhagen interpretation.” These concepts were so impenetrably specialized that Alice felt they might as well have been mathematical formulae. Sometimes, indeed, they were, but sometimes they opened into seemingly irrational theories, usually and paradoxically called solutions, such as that of an endlessly proliferating multiplicity of universes.

She had found it curiously exciting that there was a body of knowledge to which she had no access, for no matter how often the basics were explained, she found that they slipped too easily from her understanding. It was enough that a man of such intellect, and capable of thought that was so unreachably abstract, should find her appealing. But later she found her physicist to be self-centered and the workings of his mind unreachable.

She looked across the room at Gregory, wondering when he would cease to record her body and instead move his fingers across it in wonderment. Perhaps in some alternative universe he was already doing that.

“What should I do now?” she asked.

“There's a chair over there. I'd like you to sit on it.”

“It looks uncomfortable.”

“I won't keep you there.”

Alice sat down. The coarse sheet was cold against her flesh. Alert to appearing unaware, she was careful to hold her knees together and angle them away from the camera. Gregory
took the Canon from the tripod and knelt down so that he was on a level with her torso. For the next few minutes he directed Alice into the postures that he wanted; all of them were discreet.

In the alternative worlds that her physicist had talked of, perhaps another Alice, a different Alice, was leaning back on an uncovered chair, feline and available, her arms thrown back and her legs wide apart. More than once she had asked her lover if there were indeed such alternative worlds, for when she tried to think of them they receded to infinity like the images in parallel mirrors. And if they existed, was it possible that one could irrupt into another, and could this be an explanation for all the things that happened in our present world that were mysterious, unbelievable, impossible?

Her physicist had laughed. These things were theoretical abstracts, and unknowable; earthly perceptions would judge them less real than fantasies. But still Alice felt that at some time in the future there could be a revolution in thought, a breakthrough. Somehow it would be proved that the everyday sensory world was more irrational than had previously been suspected, and that the only way it could be made explicable would be by reference to forces that lay outside the simply observable.

Gregory retreated behind the tripod, lowered its height and spread his legs to look in the viewfinder. For a moment he appeared to be a creature drawn from both flesh and metal, and then he stood straight, placed his knuckles against his chin, and stared hard at Alice.

“Could you stand up again?”

She obeyed. He studied her. She could not tell what was going through his mind.

“I want to take side views. Profiles.”

“I'll look too big round the midriff.”

“Of course you won't. And don't breathe in too hard—it will be obvious if you do.”

Alice shuffled round to stand sideways on to the lens.

Unexpectedly she felt more vulnerable than she had done for the frontal shots, and her confidence began to fail. Perhaps her nose would look too large and bony, her breasts too small and not swelling out from her ribcage with an appealing round fleshiness, her nipples too prominent, her buttocks too large, her belly not flat, her pubic hair too bushy. She could never resemble a model in the prime of youth, or look anything like the other women who must have posed nude for Gregory. Instead his work would portray her as a woman in her early thirties with all the signs of her age. It would be obvious that she was pretending to be someone she was not.

Quite suddenly Alice wanted to screen herself from throat to ankle. Even the white bathrobe would have revealed too much, and instead she wanted to swaddle her body in a shapeless blanket.

Gregory sensed the change of mood and tried to soothe her.

“It's all right,” he told her, “you look fine.”

Alice looked askance at him and he saw a thin film of concern shine across her eyes. She folded her arms protectively across her breasts and then she raised one hand and left it poised in mid-air above her belly. It was as though she wanted to screen her pubis but dared not for fear of appearing irrationally frightened.

Gregory crossed the room. The wrinkled sheets on the floor made his footfalls resemble the soft padding of an animal. Defiantly Alice raised her head higher, but she could feel her heart beat faster.

“It's all right,” he repeated quietly.

Each aware of the other's nearness, they stared across the narrow gap and did not blink.

To Alice it seemed that they were like magnets, unable to approach any closer because a similarity of aim kept them apart, and that if one of them said the right words then the polarities would be suddenly reversed and they would fall into each other's arms.

Gregory cleared his throat. “You're going to look good,” he said, attempting to be gentle but finding that the words had roughened on his tongue.

Alice still guarded herself with her arms. “I don't like looking at myself in profile,” she confessed, flattening her raised hand. “There doesn't seem to be much of me in a pose like this. I'll just be a kind of cameo.”

“Your personality will be clear in these shots. I can guarantee that. I told you I'd find things that you weren't able to find.”

Unconvinced, she said nothing.

Gregory moved fractionally closer and stopped. He seemed to hang there, almost swaying, prevented from coming any nearer. Alice wondered what his attitude would be if he were the subject and she the photographer. Would he complain about too strong a light on his thinning hair, or a penis that would appear too small or too wrinkled, or a sagging belly that would prove how little exercise he took?

“I'm going to move in and take you from your hips upward, and I'm going to use the space above your head. So I want you to stretch out your arm—nearest the camera, that's right, push it up high because it will look like ivory against those walls. And as you do, incline your head.”

Alice hesitated.