A Division of the Light (10 page)

“I'll put the cross over there,” he said.

She lifted her arms to unhook the clasp and he saw that she had not recently shaved beneath them.

The crucifix was light, almost insubstantial. Gregory placed it on the shelf and then hung the blouse on a hanger with a metal hook that clicked with a noise like a turned key when he placed it on the hatstand. The beads slid against Alice's skin as she fastened
the necklace. As soon as it was secure she turned back to the lens with her arms folded protectively across her breasts as if they were naked. He could see the edging of the bra cups beneath her hands.

“What would Thomas say if he saw me posing like this?”

“If I were him, I'd feel proud.”

“And the people I work with?”

“Are they likely to? Do you care?”

“No. But maybe I should.”

Gregory gave the tolerant, experienced smile he had perfected over the years.

“You can't keep both your hands there,” he said. “I want one of them to be fingering the beads. Don't worry, I'm framing your head and shoulders, and nothing else.”

“I know.”

There was a moment's silence before Alice spoke again in a different register. This time she was gently interrogative, as if she were imitating Gregory's own technique.

“But do you really want just to copy an old photo? I don't want to be a copy of anything. Wouldn't it be better to do something different?”

He looked more closely at Alice. She dared him to read her face, but he was not sure that he could. In expression and stance and word, she lived by a vocabulary that Gregory could only partly understand.

“I'm trying to get what I promised I'd get,” he told her. “Up until now, I haven't been able to. But I'm not going to give up.”

“If this is proving a lot more difficult than you expected, then I take that as a compliment.”

Gregory continued to stare. To look away would be to fail. Silence lay between them like an invisible history.

Alice's mouth moved almost imperceptibly; he was sure that for less than a second her lips parted before they closed again. A light in her eyes made him believe that she was expecting some form of challenge, perhaps even a confrontation. Maybe she was readying herself to insult or repulse him.

“Just touch the beads with the tips of your fingers,” he instructed.

Alice raised her left hand. The bra cups were trimmed with black lace and he could see the plump milky curve of her breasts above them. The necklace contrasted too severely with the skin and the black straps heightened the pictorial discord. He had made a miscalculation.

“No—the right hand.”

Alice did as she was told and let her left arm fall by her side with the fingers spread. The beads still looked bulky, too round, too much like ivory. Gregory considered them from where he stood beside the tripod. A tiny wry smile showed momentarily on Alice's face. He wondered if his doubt was apparent.

“Let's go,” he said. “Try to look
through
the lens, rather than at it.”

She did not imitate the Margaret Cameron by turning to one side and looking down, and Gregory did not ask her to. Instead she stared directly into the lens without moving and without blinking.

The camera was neither instrument nor barrier but a conduit to whomever would study her image. At last Alice was making an imaginative link with observers whom she would never see and never know. Excitement touched her and the air in the room grew warmer. Gregory began to believe that the sitting was successful. He was on the way to getting what was needed.

After more than a dozen shots he paused with his finger resting alongside the shutter release.

“Those were just head and shoulders,” Alice said.

It was neither question nor statement. He need not have answered, but he did.

“That's what I promised,” he said.

“And were they what you wanted?”

“I think we're making progress.”

“But the beads are too heavy, aren't they? I could tell by your expression.”

“I didn't think it was obvious.”

“It was. And what you really want is obvious, too.”

Although he had no need to, Gregory busied himself at the menu screen. “And what's that?”

“You know there's a better arrangement,” she answered.

“You're quite a mind-reader, aren't you?”

“Only when a mind is easy to read.”

“Well, if it's so easy then you'll be able to tell me.”

“If you want.”

“Go on.”

“You think the necklace will look better if I'm naked to the waist. I'd have to hold my chin higher because then the proportions will be better balanced. My neck will be elongated and the curve at the base of the necklace will complement the curves on the undersides of my breasts.”

Gregory looked swiftly at Alice and then back to the menu. It was possible that she was goading him. For a wild moment he thought of telling her that the circularity and pallor of the beads would emphasize the shape and darkness of her nipples.

“You have an eye for composition,” he said.

“I'm a quick learner.”

Gregory remained standing beside the camera as he looked
her up and down. He expected Alice to wait for his response, for she seemed confident in her control, but unexpectedly she was the one to make the next move.

“Or I could put my hands behind my head. That would give greater definition, don't you agree?”

Again Gregory waited for a moment before answering.

“Of a certain kind, yes.”

“And would you like me to do that? To see how I look?”

“Try it.”

Alice lifted her arms. Her belly hollowed. A narrow bulge of the undersides of her breasts edged from below her bra. She locked her fingers together behind her head and the fall of light shifted across her face. The sparse hair within her armpits divided naturally along the line of the junction of body and limb. She stared back at Gregory as if to prove she would always be unreachable.

“Is that better?”

“Arguably. But you've said yourself how you could look even better.”

“Ah, but I'm not going to take this bra off and let you photograph me. Even though I'm falling out of it.”

“I hadn't even planned that you would strike the pose you're in.”

Alice lowered her arms, tugged at the front of her bra until she was comfortable, and then folded her arms across her chest again.

“Sometimes things don't work out as they're planned,” she said. “Instead they work out because of some sort of necessity.”

“The necessity I have is to portray you in a way that hasn't been done before. I haven't succeeded yet. I'm on the edge, but I haven't got there.”

“Maybe you're not as good as you think you are.”

Gregory's frustrated response was evenly paced. Keeping his eyes on Alice, he spoke as if addressing an observer hidden within the room.

“Oh, I'm good all right. The problem is not with my technique. The problem is Alice Fell.”

“I don't think that's true. If you're so eager to claim success, then any failure is down to you, too.”

But Gregory would not accept this.

“The problem is Alice Fell,” he repeated with extra emphasis, “because she plays around with the lens. She's not nervous and she's not uncomfortable, but she doesn't like being told what to do. She doesn't accept that I know more than she does about how to get the best out of a camera. She can't decide about her part in our agreement because she likes to change her mind. She changes it a lot—that's what gives her energy. She likes to disconcert people. She's the kind of person who only feels good when she can fuck things up.”

Alice's face hardened. She was angry and perplexed. Gregory pressed the shutter release. He had taken about seven frames before she began to regain her composure.

“You tricked me into that.”

“There was no trick. All I did was say what I think.”

Her features set in disapproval. Even though the expression was staged, Gregory took another three or four shots.

“And now you look truculent,” he said.

“That's what I feel. So would you.”

“I don't think
m
y ambition would be to look like a spoiled adolescent. Alice, you photograph better when you're caught out, angered, stung. If you don't believe me I'll put the images up here, on this screen.”

“Maybe I should just turn my back on you. Maybe you'd be happier if my face didn't even appear in your precious photographs.”

Gregory's confidence began to build. He raised an ironic finger in the air as if to register the value of her comment.

“Great idea. I'll concentrate on your back and nothing else. I knew you had an eye for composition.”

Alice responded angrily.

“And you'd be able to show me books with dozens of photos of women's bare backs, wouldn't you? Including Lee Miller's?”

“Hundreds. I'll lend you one. All you have to do is ask.”

“You keep telling me that you want the camera to see into the hidden parts of my personality. They won't come through on photographs that don't show my face.”

“No?”

“You know they won't.”

“It's not that straightforward. I would argue that the body is an expression of the personality. And I would say that generalities come through, but not specifics.”

“And what good is that?”

“Oh, you can find out a lot about a woman by the way she holds herself, or lifts her arms, or tilts her head. An image of her back would ignore the one part of the body that is most obviously a record of particular experience, and that's her face. It would be a study of form that makes a point about the nature of being human.”

“I don't want to represent anyone other than myself. I'm not a type, I'm an individual.”

“You're both. We all are.”

Gregory paced back and forth across the studio. The rush of confidence was an intoxicant. He felt that photographer and
sitter were on the brink of an achievement, even if they would be unable to recognize that achievement until they actually reached it.

And now Gregory was certain that eventually Alice would do whatever he asked her to do. There was a direction, a mechanism, to everything.

“You should stand up,” he said.

She remained seated. Still Gregory had no doubts.

“Stand up because it'll look better that way.”

Alice stood.

“And now turn round so that you face away from me.”

She turned. Gregory stared at her like a man assessing a purchase. Alice felt both objectified and honored; the paradox made her blush.

“I love the female body,” he said quietly.

“That's all right for you to say. You don't have to live in one.”

“It's because I don't that I can see it better than its owners can.”

He took a step forward. As he did so, his fingers rose to his mouth.

There were layers to Gregory's fascination. At times he treated women in a functional, mercenary manner, and gave no thought to anything except sexual pleasure. He understood the mechanics of gratification as easily as he understood the workings of a camera, and it was with a camera that he often recorded the objects of these briefly energetic liaisons.

But sometimes, in contrast, Gregory loved women for their natural softness, their comfort and tolerance, and he took delight in simple closeness, as though he were a trustworthy brother or father to those he befriended. And at other times his enjoyment of a woman's body was aesthetic, objective, and confirmed to him
that he was like any true artist in being able to study female nudity for its sculptural beauty. Sometimes, very rarely, he had passed through this stage into a state resembling a trance and that was both spiritual and erotic. At these moments it was made clear to him that what distinguished a woman was something akin to blessedness, as though design and function were identical to the sacred and the ultimately mysterious. Sometimes he even thought that when he treated women uncaringly, he was taking revenge because they could generate such feelings of awe within him. And sometimes he felt that this revenge also had something to do with the death of his wife.

The difficulty with Alice was that she encouraged all kinds of response, and Gregory could not be certain which one he should aim to develop. As she stood before him now, facing away, he began to fantasize that, uniquely and contradictorily, she was so protean that he would be able to treat her as all things.

The necklace clasp was partly screened beneath hair that had been cut to fall along the base of Alice's neck. There were faint pigmentation marks across the shoulders where she would perhaps have had freckles as a child, and a dimple set like a small crater into the skin below the right shoulder blade. A small white label on her bra was sticking out above the fastenings. The plunge of her spine led beneath the high waistband of her gray trousers and a thin black line that was all that was exposed of her underwear.

Gregory stepped closer. “The necklace doesn't work,” he admitted.

“Why?”

“It detracts.”

“You want me to take it off.”

“Yes.”

As she reached to the back of her neck and unfastened the clasp he watched the muscles slide beneath her skin.

“I'll take it,” Gregory said, stretching out a hand.

Alice turned a little to one side and let the necklace coil into his palm in a series of tiny clicks. The beads were warm from the touch of her flesh. He walked across the room and placed them next to the crucifix. She folded her arms across her chest.

Gregory held the light meter a few inches from her skin and noted the reading.

“You look good,” he told her.

“You want my arms like this?”

“For the moment. The label is sticking out, here. I'll just hide it.”