A Division of the Light

by Christopher Burns

  “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 my 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.”

  Alice did not complain. Gregory pushed the tag so that it was hidden, felt for the first time the warm texture of her flesh, and imagined unfastening the clips so that the tight black straps relaxed from her torso and then fell away. And then he imagined sliding his hands around her body and cupping her breasts in them so that her nipples were between his fingers. He lifted the camera from the tripod, took several more shots, and spoke again.

  “And now I want them raised, with your hands at the back of your head.”

  “You can see that I haven’t shaved under my arms. Does that make a difference?”

  “Mapplethorpe’s photos of Lisa Lyon show underarm hair.”

  “Why do you mention other photographers so often? Aren’t you confident of your own opinion?”

  “I like a little body hair on women. In the right places it’s natural and it flatters. That’s my opinion.”

  Alice lifted her hands slowly and gracefully, like a swan about to fly.

  “I never expected to pose like this,” she said.

  Gregory did not answer. When she continued, he could not tell if it was wry amusement that he could detect in her voice.

  “I think that maybe this is what you were after all the time. Am I right? And I think you’d really like to photograph me in just a pair of knickers and nothing else.”

  “Of course I wouldn’t. That would be a glamour shot. I don’t do glamour shots.”

  “And naked wouldn’t be a glamour shot?”

  “Not the way that I would do it. If I were to photograph you nude I’d have you stretched out with your arms above your head, maybe against a background of plush, maybe just against a rumpled sheet. Female body geometry is more pleasing than a man’s. You can see it in the form of triangles. One triangle has its points at the armpits and the pubis, another starts at the eyebrows and finishes at the same place, and yet another draws imaginary lines across the nipples and down to the navel. There are more examples.”

  “Do you always think in abstractions?”

  “I see what’s there.”

  “But you’re not going to see me. Because I wouldn’t let you photograph me without clothes.”

  “No? I still think you should consider it. For now, what I’d like—”

  “Shall I guess? You’d like me to take off this bra. Am I right?”

  “You needn’t turn round. Unless you wanted to.”

  “It will leave marks on my skin.”

  “You’re young. They vanish quickly. And I can adjust things so they don’t show.”

  Nothing happened for several seconds.

  “No one can see in through those windows,” he promised, and glanced up at the skylight. Clouds had gathered over the city.

  “After this you can leave,” he added.

  “You think you’ve done enough?”

  “No. But we’ll call it a day.”

  There was a moment’s hesitation, and then Alice crooked her arms around her back. While Gregory watched she lifted the straps from her shoulders and then stood with the bra dangling from her right hand. Her left hand appeared to be held firmly across her breasts as though she still wished to protect them.

  “Just drop it on the chair,” he said.

  She did so.

  “The waistband of your trousers is too high,” Gregory said.

  “They’re staying on.”

  “If you just unfastened them and pushed them down a few inches, along with your underwear, I could photograph the small of your back.”

  “Is that important?”

  “For symmetry, yes. And suggestion.”

  “Suggestion?”

  “The body changes into rounded forms, and it divides. The spot at the base of the spine is a pictorial node.”

  Alice loosened buttons at the front of her trousers and pushed them down about four inches with her thumbs. The swell of her buttocks protruded from above the waistband.

  “You want my hands behind my head again?” she said flatly.

  “No. I want them stretched out.”

  She put out her arms.

  “No—straight out, as if they were taking your weight. Imagine that you’re being crucified. That’s it. And your head down a bit—not too far; no, raise it slightly. That’s perfect. Hold it like that for a few seconds.”

  Gregory moved in, bringing the margins closer so that only the upper part of Alice’s arms were in the frame, emphasizing her shoulders, her neck and the long fall of her spine. The shutter clicked as rapidly as an animal’s warning. He knew that all the frames would be what he wanted.

  “That’s it,” he said, at first triumphantly and then quietly, “that’s it.”

  “Happy?” she asked.

  “Not happy but content. For the time being. But I feel we’ve only just begun.”

  “And I feel that we’ve finished, so I’m getting dressed now.”

  “Right,” Gregory said.

  He turned away so that he was not watching. Even so, he was sharply aware of Alice’s presence. He could smell her perfume, sense her warmth, and the small noises that she made while dressing disturbed and excited his imagination more than he was able to admit.

  And now he knew for certain what he had always suspected; that he needed Alice Fell in his life, and that he wanted to know far more about her than she was willing to reveal.

  A steady pulse of images flicked across the screen. Chin resting on one hand, eyes rarely blinking, Gregory was absorbed in the sequence. Whenever the slide show came to a stop he started it again. He had done this three times already, and
so far he had not deleted a single shot.

  Gregory had been aware of the increasing number of exposures, but now that they were parading before him it was evident that they were both too many and not enough. Too many because he had taken more shots of Alice than he had expected, and not enough because, despite the quality of those taken toward the end of the session, neither photographer nor model had advanced to the obvious next step.

  Any professional, Gregory believed, would look beyond this accumulation of images and see that it concealed an unexplored level of honesty. Once that was acknowledged, then even his best compositions would be judged as frustrating configurations of hints, approximations and evasions.

  Alice stared out at him. At first her character seemed as flat as the rectangle that contained her; later she appeared to be playacting, awkward, coy. What had been teasingly promising in the studio appeared archly counterfeit on the screen.

  Gregory leaned back in his chair, put his hands behind his head, scratched the back of his neck, then bent forward and put his hands back on the keyboard. The chair squeaked like a hinge that needed oil.

  For more than a minute Cassie had stood beside the door, a printout held in her hands, and carefully watched how her father was absorbed in the display. Eventually she drew up a chair and sat down.

  “A problem of choice?” she asked.

  “You can tell which ones are the best. They’re obvious. Just as it’s obvious that the session can’t be called an unqualified success. You can see that, can’t you?”

  Instead of answering, Cassie placed the printout next to the keyboard. It was a page from the website of a hotel chain, and it showed two watercolor sketches of a modernist hotel built in the 1930s. Across them Cassie had written dates, figures and question marks. Gregory had already worked for the company four times.

  He glanced at the printout and then looked back at the screen. “I’m trying to get out of brochure work.”

  “But this is quality: rich guests only. The relaunch is costing a fortune. Whoever takes the photographs will make a lot of money.”

  Gregory nodded, uninterested.

  “Designed by Lubetkin and there’s a mural by Eric Gill. They say the building is in Pevsner. So it would be an interesting shoot.”

  “Right. So you could do it.”