A Division of the Light

by Christopher Burns

  Gregory stepped further down the ladder, but halted on the lowest rung. “Don’t make too many,” he said.

  “I want copies of every photograph. I don’t want a selection and I don’t want to be shown what you think is good and not shown what you think is bad. I want the complete file. You may be the man behind the shutter, but the photographs will be of me. I have a right to them all. I have a right to see how I look.”

  As Gregory stepped onto the stone floor of the crypt, the ladder scraped along it with a metallic squeal.

  “You have no legal claim on my work,” he told her. “I’ve said before that they are my copyright and that’s how they’ll stay.”

  “I don’t want control over what you take. I only want an agreement as to where you could show them. Or if you show them. I don’t want to find myself in some magazine that everyone can read.”

  “I understand. And where would you like to find yourself?”

  “A print hung on the wall of an exhibition would be different.”

  “It would.”

  Alice stepped back and almost knocked into the wooden upright of the nearest rack. The empty sockets stared outward.

  “I’ll arrange it,” Gregory said quietly.

  Excited, uncertain, she nodded and was suddenly breathless.

  “Right,” she said.

  In a hundred years’ time, Alice thought, people would be able to study her body as she was able to study the daguerreotypes. In however partial or incomplete a way, a part of her would be made permanent. She would have achieved a kind of success. Her image would live forever in the present.

  *

  If Gregory had been completely financially independent and free to photograph whatever subject he wished, the bone crypt would still have been among his choices. The unsettling atmosphere of the underground chamber appealed to him. From it he obtained images that were lit and balanced with an exactitude that few of his competitors could have matched. When he examined them he could see that several were good enough to be classed among his very best work. He visualized them as gelatin silver prints hung in his planned exhibition, the hard curves of the skulls providing a memento mori to the organic softness of his portraits and nude studies. The ossuary’s bleakness would counterpoint the detailed clothing, finely textured faces and candidly shot flesh displayed on the adjacent walls.

  But as he daydreamed about this triumph, Gregory was also imagining Alice naked and enticing in front of his lens.

  At her desk on the other side of the room Cassie finished her conversation, put down the phone, and fingered a necklace fashioned from metallic loops. She had not worn her mother’s necklace since Gregory had borrowed it to hang round Alice’s neck.

  “The picture editor says they’ll go ahead as planned. First week of next month.”

  “That’s good.”

  Gregory asked no further question. More and more he was coming to rely on his daughter. Last week she had taken his place on one of the less important assignments, and next week she was due to cover another. As usual Cassie had protested, albeit briefly, but Gregory had insisted. After all, he reasoned, his name was also the name of the company, so the sessions need not involve him personally; his daughter was just as much part of the Gregory Pharaoh business as he was. Afterward and as usual he had checked Cassie’s work and found it imitative. It was, therefore, perfectly acceptable.

  “We still have to discuss these,” Cassie said.

  Gregory moved his fingers across the keyboard in apparent idleness, but then opened a file of the photographs of Alice that he had taken weeks ago in the studio. He was determined to study them again. Sculpted by light, motionless, Alice gazed out at him like a provocation. For more than a minute he did not speak.

  Cassie watched him. Often she could not decide whether Gregory had begun to daydream, or whether his extended silences were expressions of a growing melancholia.

  “Dad,” she asked, “are you listening?”

  “Of course I’m listening. Why wouldn’t I be?”

  Cassie picked up a thin file of papers and stood up. As soon as Gregory’s screen was in view she noticed what he was studying. Gregory considered exiting the picture file but did not. After all, he had nothing to hide.

  A chair with castors stood in the corner of the office. When Cassie moved it so that she could sit next to him it rumbled across the uneven floorboards like distant thunder.

  “There are six potential commissions here,” she told Gregory. “Four are probable, but two of those are due soon. I need you to comment.”

  “Are they in this country?”

  “Yes. Why?”

  He shrugged defensively. “At the moment I don’t feel like traveling overseas.”

  “It’s never bothered you before. You always said you liked to get away.”

  Gregory did not answer. Cassie looked askance at the screen. A spectral Alice Fell stood with her arms raised like a dancer in an unexplained rite. High contrast made her skin flare white, as if lit by burning phosphorus, while her eyes and lips were darkened like kohl. A well of shadow behind her collarbone was as sharp as a crescent. To Cassie she looked like a woman who would stop at nothing to get what she wanted.

  “Can’t you stop looking at these?” she asked.

  “It’s important to be self-critical. You know that as well as I do.”

  Cassie decided not to answer. The images moved onward.

  After a few seconds she spoke again. “You took this sequence from eye level or below. The viewpoint favors her.”

  “I hope you’re not trying to say that I glamorized my subject. These are conventional dynamics and you know it.”

  Immediately Gregory felt that perhaps he had responded too harshly, but that it would be inadvisable to retract what he had said.

  Cassie ignored him and placed her hand on top of the folder as though it contained documents for a court case. “This is your business, not mine. I’m just an employee. Part-time, at that.”

  Gregory saw the chance to recover a balance. “I’ve been thinking about what I said. Maybe the business needs you more than either of us has ever fully recognized.”

  “Maybe, but you’re still the one who has to decide what you want to accept and what you don’t.”

  “But you must have been considering the options,” Gregory said.

  Cassie did not answer, but opened the file and indicated the uppermost printout. It concerned a musician, in the country for only a week, with distinctive features and the air of a man used to posing for his portrait.

  “You could do it,” Gregory suggested. “It would be good for you.”

  “Dad, he’s important,” she said.

  But Cassie also thought that if her father were so lacking in energy then it would indeed be rewarding if she were to take some of the more interesting commissions. Maybe she had let her life become stale; maybe she should be thinking forward to the time when her father would retire.

  “And the hotel?” Gregory asked.

  “What?”

  “The hotel that’s having thousands poured into its renovation. When am I supposed to be covering that?”

  “I wasn’t talking about the hotel.”

  “No, but I am. Do we know the dates?”

  She waited for a moment before replying. “I’d have to check the calendar, but it’s not for weeks. They’ll still be working on the last phase of the refurbishment.”

  “Have we an estimate?”

  “If you like I could phone and ask for an update. But we need to sort out this musician first.”

  “I’d like to take a look at the rooms beforehand. Just to get a sense of the perspectives. Can you tell them I want to do that?”

  Cassie looked closely at him. Her father had never been so unduly concerned about a shoot. Very quickly she began to wonder if his request had something to do with Alice Fell. She indicated the screen.

  “Do you mind turning this off while we talk?”

  “It’s all
right as it is.”

  “No, it isn’t. Neither of us will be able to concentrate.”

  Gregory pressed a few keys and the file collapsed into its icon. Seeing that he would go no further, Cassie reached out in front of him and switched off the monitor.

  “You’re determined,” he told her.

  “One of us has to be.”

  “I’m going to say yes to the musician.”

  “Good. That’s the right thing to do. There are these others, too. You have to think them through. Or both of us have to do that.”

  Gregory nodded. He was aware of his own behavior patterns and was faintly embarrassed at seemingly being unable to alter them. When he saw how Cassie was reading his mood he shrugged and then tightened his mouth in a fatalistic smile.

  “All right,” he agreed. “But I’ll need to know about the hotel.”

  “Do you want to use an unfinished hotel as a location?”

  “It’s an idea. It could work.”

  Cassie took a chance. “And you want Alice Fell to be in that room.”

  Because he considered lying, Gregory waited before responding. And then he spoke.

  “Why not?”

  Cassie looked down at the papers on the desk and smoothed the uppermost document with her fingers even though it was already flat.

  “We really must come to an agreement on these,” she insisted.

  “Cassie, I know what you think about Alice.”

  “Really.”

  “You don’t mince your words. You see things in her that I don’t see. But all she is to me is a professional challenge. I’m annoyed with myself because I haven’t been able to do her justice yet.”

  “Photographically,” Cassie said.

  “I wouldn’t be speaking in any other way, would I?”

  His daughter said nothing. She just kept looking down at the file. Gregory felt impelled to speak again.

  “Cassie, I haven’t slept with Alice.”

  She did not think that he had. But she kept silent.

  “I’m telling you the truth.”

  “Dad, you might not have slept with her, but it’s obvious that you want to. And that’s getting in the way of your professional objectivity. You’re a photographer, not some kind of suitor.”

  Gregory had not known that his desires were so easily read.

  “What is she after, really?” Cassie asked. “You must have your suspicions.”

  “I don’t think she’s after anything.”

  “She must be. I can see the calculation in her eyes.”

  “I don’t think so. Maybe she seems aloof, but actually she’s unusually responsive to the world around her. I enjoy her company and I enjoy photographing her. And that’s it. That’s all. I’ve told you not to worry.”

  “But I do.”

  Gregory said nothing.

  “Dad, let me make a suggestion. It’s very forward of me.”

  “I’m not sure I want to hear this.”

  “Of course you do.”

  “Cassie,” he said warningly, but she would not be stopped.

  “Why don’t you just sleep with the woman? Seduce her. Take the initiative. It’s easy for you. Put yourself back in control. In all probability you’ll wake up the next morning and everything will seem ordinary and everyday. You’ll not be bothered any more. You’ll see Alice Fell for what she is.”

  Gregory put both hands up to his face, spread his fingers across the top of his eyebrows, and pushed his thumbs into his face just below the cheekbones.

  “But I don’t know if I should sleep with her.”

  “But you want to. I know that and she knows that.”

  “Most of the time I want to. But there’s a part of me that says that I’d be doing wrong.”

  Cassie leaned back. The chair creaked a little, like a rope under strain.

  “You make it sound even worse than I thought,” she said.

  8

  Off-white sheets were spread across the floor and draped across the furniture. Each sheet needed to be washed, and many were marked by dried paint that had accidentally been dripped on them. Most of the spots and smears were of muted pastel colors, although sometimes a cluster of vivid primaries stood out from the surface. A fractured wave of bright blue, as if from a carelessly dropped brush, ran along a fold of cloth near the far wall, while the sheet thrown across a nearby couch was starred with a constellation of red that was the color of arterial blood. Any sound within the room was both hushed and hollow, and Gregory’s tread was muffled as he walked to the window and stood against a glare of afternoon sunlight. Outside he could see the hotel gardens. A sprinkler threw out water in brilliant whirling fans, but no one moved through the landscaped greenery.

  He turned back and pushed the shirtsleeves up over his forearms. His favorite Canon had been placed like a sentinel on a tripod in the middle of the room. Beyond it Alice stood in a white toweling robe fastened by a loosely knotted cord. She had undressed and fixed her lipstick and hair in a bathroom that had already been converted into something gleaming and pristine. As she did so, Gregory had found himself wondering if she would take a shower afterward, and how she would look naked with water coursing across her skin. He spoke gently to encourage her.

  “Whenever you’re ready.”

  “You have to give me some time.”

  “Of course. But the sooner you take off that robe the sooner you’ll feel comfortable, and the sooner we can start.”

  Alice did not move. The milky varnish on her nails was the color of the internal curves of seashells. Raising his hands for emphasis, Gregory used a line of argument he had often used on others.

  “You have to be confident in yourself. Sessions like this always make my models feel liberated and alive. They have their pride validated. And they tell me that the feeling never leaves them.”

  He paused, as if deciding whether he should risk the next sentence.

  “You must have known men who delighted in seeing you walk naked across a room.”

  Alice did not answer, but continued to look at him as if she were wondering what would happen next.

  “Remember the sense of power that must have given you,” Gregory told her. “Imagine the camera is one of those men. Because the camera is just as fascinated, just as transfixed.”

  And Alice remembered a time when she strode across a floor with such naked confident grace that her lover merely sat motionless in rapt attention, and then told her she was the most sensual creature he had ever seen. She remembered her own feelings clearly, but could not remember which of her lovers was the one who had been so entranced.

  “I’m ready to get started,” Gregory said.

  “Give me a few more seconds. Maybe I’ll surprise you.”

  Alice reflected that Gregory did not know, just as Thomas would never know, of the lovers she had enjoyed, or of the abandonment that had often transported her. And yet that sensual paradise had never lasted. Instead it had always become jaded, unoriginal, emptied.

  It was almost certain that if she were to take Gregory to bed then their relationship would follow the same downward curve and terminate in a wasteland of boredom and distrust. And then she would become distressed and angered if he did not also recognize that the affair was exhausted.

  Without ever having a clear sense of destiny, Alice had always aimed to discover something different in life. She believed herself equipped for deep insight, and at the start of every love affair she longed for a sense of meaning to strike her with a force so illuminating that her life could suddenly be seen to have shape and purpose.

  One of her lovers had been a lecturer in drama, steeped in literary history, from whom she had learned that all of life could be viewed as fictive, as conforming to known archetypes. Every relationship she had had, and every one that she would have, could be deconstructed into a set of games: into strategies, advances, feints and negotiated settlements. More than once he had told her that ancient drama often allowed conclusions to be wroug
ht by divine intervention, and that a god would appear from the edge of the stage and arrange the fate of every character. Alice could not believe in the divine, but it seemed plausible to her that similar energies must be at work in the present-day material world—if not, then perhaps her own life was just a sequence of variations on lives already lived by others. These energies were always just at the edge of detection, as they were at the edge of reason, but a nearby revelation could sometimes be partly sensed, like a change of pressure in the air. Alice strove to be convinced that a system of equity would somehow ensure that eventually she would be awarded a form of enlightenment that she could not as yet imagine.

  For a while it had seemed that sensual ecstasy was part of a transformative power. Now it was beginning to appear possible that Alice had been wrong. All of her lovers had given her pleasure, diversion and new perspectives, but not one of them had enriched her understanding beyond limits from which it would have been impossible to return. Even though that kind of transformation could often seem to be just beyond her reach, perhaps it was actually illusory. Even in its most modest forms it would never be found within an embrace. Like a mirage, true enlightenment lay both elsewhere and nowhere.

  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.