An Idol for Others (31 page)

“Sure,” Walter called back, and Herbie came shambling into the room carrying two large awkward cases of photographic equipment. He was a big untidy shapeless bear of a man and the best photographer Walter knew. He was followed by a trim, handsome young man. Herbie introduced him to Walter as Mark Something and shook off outer garments. Hat, raincoat, and jacket landed in a pile on a chair, and he crouched over his cases in rumpled shirtsleeves.

“Is there someplace I can hang my clothes?” the young man asked.

“Oh, sure.” Walter appraised him with his casting director’s eyes. He would do well enough for this job, he supposed; but he wasn’t the spectacular beauty Herbie had promised when Walter had explained to him what he had in mind for the poster. There had been some sort of to-do about Mark’s posing in the nude in the privacy of Herbie’s studio, and Walter had suggested having the session here.

He took the model to the bedroom, continuing his discreet appraisal. His expression was grave, his features well-formed but slightly heavy, and he reminded him of someone. He was shorter than Walter and probably only a year or so younger. He was so impeccably groomed and his dark suit so sharply pressed that Walter went immediately to the overflowing closet to get him a hanger. He held it out, wondering why Herbie had made such a point of his beauty, and looked at the hand that reached for it. It was a beautiful hand, smooth and shapely, with elegantly tapered fingers, and what it suggested about the body’s structure gave a clue to Herbie’s enthusiasm.

He glanced again at the slightly swarthy face and placed the resemblance that had eluded him. Mark looked like the Olympian
Apollo.
Walter had always been intrigued by the statue because it conformed so little to the classic ideal of masculine beauty. It had a strong head, faintly archaic and forbidding and full of character. Mark’s face was marked by a more contemporary, softer sensuality, but it had the
Apollo
’s brooding quality and the mysterious command. Walter went back to the closet and pulled out a floor-length black velvet cloak that he had salvaged from one of his productions and threw it on the end of the bed.

“You can wear that until. Herbie is ready if you want.” They acknowledged each other with slight nods, and Walter returned to the living room. Herbie was setting up his lights. Walter helped him push furniture around the crowded room while they chatted familiarly. They worked frequently together.

“Better get those curtains closed,” Herbie muttered, peering into one of his cameras. He gave the impression of seeing nothing except through a camera’s eye. A look of innocent benevolence somehow emerged from his face. “The kid’s terrific-looking, isn’t he?”

“I didn’t see it at first, but he’s perfect,” Walter agreed. The model was working on his imagination. His Theatre Today posters had become a small feature of the city’s life. The press usually gave space to each new one, and
The New Yorker
frequently ran a paragraph about them. They were usually designed by the young painters and designers who worked for the theater. Walter had planned a photographic layout as a novelty, inspired by a technique Herbie had evolved whereby the human body was given the look of marble yet remained hauntingly lifelike. Walter had been intrigued by the opportunity to become an instant sculptor and had found a loose allusion to the theme of an Italian play he was planning for the fall.

Walter went to the bookshelves and pulled out a rough sketch he had made of the composition, planning revisions if the young man’s body lived up to the promise of his hands. Dismembered arms and legs were placed in surrealistic juxtaposition to a central torso. He would get the remarkable hands in somewhere. The young man reentered the room draped in the cloak, and Walter dropped the sketch on a table and circled disarranged furniture to join him.

“Herbie’s about ready. If you don’t mind taking that thing off, I’d like to see you under the lights.”

“You wanted me to strip completely, didn’t you?”

“Yes, we’ll crop you where necessary, of course.” Walter smiled and saw intelligence and response in the eyes that met his but none of the flirtatiousness that he so often encountered in the line of business. “That sounds rather drastic. The point is, I want to show as much of you as the law allows, so we have to start with all of you.”

The grave expression lit with humor. “I see. I’ve never been asked to pose stark naked before. I didn’t much like the idea until Mr. Uhlray–uh, Herbie–said it was for you. I hope I’m OK for the job.”

“Herbie seems sure enough.” Walter found it odd having this conversation with Apollo. “I have some ideas. If you’ll just stand around for a minute without posing, I can see how they fit.”

The young man turned from him and shrugged off the cloak and dropped it onto a chair as he passed and stepped out into the lit area that had turned part of the living room into a sort of stage. Walter followed slowly, his eyes’registering a series of startlingly satisfying pictures–a broad back tapering to a long curve of buttocks that flowed into well-developed legs, proud shoulders with a dancer’s rather than an athlete’s smoothly muscled definition of chest and abdomen, firmly rounded thighs and calves without bulges that rested on big arched feet as beautifully articulated as the hands, the skin immaculate and unblemished and nearly hairless so that every line was picked up by light without blurring. Walter tried to exclude genitalia from his range of vision, since it wouldn’t figure in the final results. His eyes traveled up to the solid column of neck, swelling at the Adam’s apple, easily supporting the slightly heavy jaw. Isolated by light, the young man seemed to acquire height, yet the body retained a well-knit cohesive look, line flowing into line with no interruption, so perfectly proportioned that Walter felt an ounce more or less would mar its extraordinary symmetry. The most perfect body he had ever seen? Harry’s had been a young athlete’s body, and Walter knew that he might find it uninteresting if he saw it for the first time today. This one had the subtlety of sculpture, full of secret promises, waiting to be brought to life by the beholder.

“You’re magnificent,” he said, standing just out of the light a few feet away. “Really beautiful.”

The young man’s eyes found Walter’s across the lights. He smiled faintly. “Thanks. Coming from Walter Makin, that means a lot.”

“Thank
you
,” Walter felt a small lift of pleasure at the realization that the brief exchange had put them in touch with each other. For an instant it struck him as wildly incongruous that there was a young man standing naked in his living room, and then he was recalled to the purpose of the occasion. Herbie wheezed and puffed at his side.

“Ready, Herb? Carry on. I don’t see how you can go wrong. Oh, and Mark–is that right? Mark?” He crossed the barrier of light that separated them and was surprised to find himself looking down once more from his superior height. “Now that I’ve seen you, I think I know what I want. Keep all your body open. I don’t necessarily want to give you poses. Try anything that feels right. But open. Free.” The intimacy he always felt when he was working with an actor was beginning to build between them. Mark watched him attentively. “Try reaching for the sky. Or embracing the world. Or flying, diving, anything. Think of all your body opening out.” Walter accompanied his words with brief mimes of what he had in mind. They stood close together, their eyes seeking confirmation in each other; but the intimacy they were creating was the intimacy of shared creation, quite sexual. “I know. Try a big morning stretch.”

Walter withdrew a step. Mark spread his feet and put a hand on his hip and shot his other arm into the air. He arched his back and flung back his head and thrust his hips off at an angle to his torso. His cock seemed to stretch too with this great easing of his body as if exposing himself so defenselessly around him.

“Christ, yes,” Walter exclaimed. “You’re fantastic. Get cracking, Herbie. I want him like that from every angle.” He backed away from the lights, leaving Mark pinpointed alone in a lascivious moment of awakening. Only then was Walter aware of the sharp pang of desire that had awakened in him. It receded as all his professional attention was engaged in the job at hand.

He encouraged Mark to break the pose frequently and re-create it with variations so as not to let it get rigidly set. Walter was fascinated by the way he moved, without self-consciousness or cultivated grace but with natural, unemphatic masculinity. Walter’s eyes were so satisfied by the line of his back, from shoulder to the elongated spheres of buttocks, that he was scarcely aware of the temptation it stirred in him. When he was sure he had all the shots he needed for his central figure, he had Herbie work on details of arms and legs, and his concentration on the job slackened, and his fascination began to engage him more personally. He focused on features that hitherto had registered only as part of the whole. His eyes lingered on the level brow that was somehow slightly forbidding, on the heavy eyelids that, when lowered, gave the face a darkly seductive look, on the thick, dark straight hair that was shaggy around the edges and invited a hand to smooth it. The mouth wasn’t fleshy, but the curve of the lips was stirringly sensual. Their eyes met frequently during his scrutiny, Mark’s in turn questioning, as if he wondered what Walter found to interest him, or contemplative, as if it were natural for their eyes to rest on each other, with a spark of intensity in their depths.

At a word from Herbie, Mark lay on his back on the floor and lifted an arm, and the contact between them was broken. It left a void in Walter that was immediately filled with a rush of desire. His sex gave a leap, and his heart raced. He wanted to touch this superbly naked young man. Mark. He was Mark. He wanted to whisper his name to him and make him his own. Mark lay stretched out on the floor, naked, offering himself to any taker. He saw his chest and abdomen rising and falling with the infinitely thrilling breath of life. He wanted to lie with him and hold him and feel him breathing against him. He looked at the sex inert between his open legs and longed to see it spring up with desire. His mind raced back to explore every look they had exchanged. Had there been an invitation he had missed? Was Mark an adept who would take a sexual advance for granted, or would he dismiss him with contempt as a queer? Walter had no idea and didn’t know how to find out. The boys who had flirted with him over the years hadn’t taught him how to take the initiative.

Thinking of the complications of getting him alone and revealing his intentions cooled him. Just because a male with a beautiful body lay naked and tantalizingly available on his living room floor didn’t mean that he would drop the restraints that had become a part of his nature. He turned away and immediately wondered if Mark would regard his withdrawal as a sign of indifference.

Ridiculous. The young man probably hadn’t given him a thought except perhaps to wonder if Walter Makin might be useful to him. Herbie would be finished soon, and they would pack up and leave. And he would have the pleasure of constructing a striking poster out of the elements of Mark’s extraordinary body.

“Good, kid. You’re great,” Herbie said behind him. “Just one more full-length, and that’ll do it.”

Walter turned back. Mark was once more on his feet, and his eyes were waiting to greet him. They were straightforward, uncomplicated, acquiescent in some odd way that might have nothing to do with sex.

“Feet apart. Arms up a bit, away from your sides. Let’s see some of that old pelvic thrust.”

Mark followed Herbie’s instructions with his eyes fixed on Walter. At the last order, he smiled suddenly for the first time, and Walter’s knees seemed to give way. It was a lovely smile, gentle, with more sweetness than humor, utterly disarming. Walter watched him as he found his balance on feet that seemed to grip the floor. His hips were thrust forward, his arms slightly lifted. It was a wrestler’s pose and brought all the perfections of his body into taut balance. Looking at Walter, he moved his hands from the wrists so that he was no longer a wrestler but became an eager love reaching out for his loved one. Walter’s eyes dropped involuntarily, and he saw the sex spring out, lengthen, acquire girth. He lifted his eyes hastily and saw the muscle of Mark’s jaw flex and the intensity of his gaze deepen.

“Fine. That does it,” Herbie announced.

Walter moved swiftly to the cloak and gathered it up and entered the pool of light. He dropped it over Mark’s back and exerted a slight pressure on his shoulders. “Sit a minute. We’ve given you a real workout.” He went about unplugging lamps, waiting for the excitement in him to subside. His sex was uncomfortably restricted by clothes. He went to the windows and pulled open the curtains. He could assume, he supposed, that Mark’s brief partial erection had been for him. He wouldn’t be dismissed with contempt. Then what? Did he really intend to give way to impulses he dreaded in himself? It was too complicated and threatened to become more trouble than it was worth. Forget it.

He joined Herbie and helped him dismantle the lamp stands. They discussed the shots Walter was most interested in. Mark sat near them. Walter couldn’t bring himself to look at him yet. He felt the man’s eyes on him while he crouched with Herbie, packing equipment.

“That pretty near does it,” the photographer said. “You better get dressed, kid. Mr. Makin’s a busy man.”

Walter stood and turned to him, his heart beating rapidly again as the moment approached to let him go. Mark was sitting with a leg tucked under him, the cloak draped around him. Their eyes met. Mark started unfolding his leg to rise. The cloak was an encumbrance. Something caught. He teetered and flung out an arm to recover his balance. The cloak flew open. His cock was erect, not long but massive, an aggressive extension of his beautiful body. He tugged at the cloak and freed it and covered himself as he found his footing. Walter glanced down at Herbie; he was tucking in his last camera, oblivious. He lifted his eyes to Mark. He looked stricken. It had been an accident–not, as Walter had thought for a few flustered seconds, an outright provocation. He thought of the guileless smile. Mark hugged the cloak around him and started for the bedroom. Walter waited a beat. He wasn’t conscious of making a decision. He found himself moving rapidly across the room so that he reached the door ahead of Mark and blocked it.