A web developer whom Nanette used to sleep with, and maybe still did, credited the Soviet system for the Hungarians’ reputation as gifted computer programmers and scientists. The government back then, this guy said, distributed very little funding to the scientific community in comparison to what it gave to the military, or even to the arts, yet it demanded results on par with the advances coming out of the United States and Japan. Those tech professionals who remained behind after the short-lived revolution of 1956 and their descendants learned to make do with substandard equipment and facilities and even to create comparable products despite the limitations. When the free markets opened up and new equipment came rolling over the Western border, the Hungarians found themselves able to use it more efficiently than their lazy, capital-fattened counterparts around the globe. That was the theory at least, and it was one Nanette co-opted for her photography. She figured that if she could make do with five months of miserable weather and poor light every year, by the time she got back to San Diego she would understand sunlight in a way somehow different from the local, art school-trained losers. And her approach was already beginning to pay off. The Ernst Galléria, one of the better small museums in the city, had included a series of her platinum prints in an international group show. The sequence, “Cinders I–XIV,” titled in part after Cindy Sherman, included claustrophobic self-portraits of Nanette sitting on the toilet in a tight V-neck, with her nipples erect and panties at her ankles, pouring petrol on herself from a metal can, as if, most people thought, in preparation for setting herself on fire. A wet T-shirt contest done with gasoline. She never told the show’s curator, but once confessed to Melanie that she really did intend to immolate herself that day. To record her own death. She never explained what stopped her, the box of matches already in hand.
Nan had some emotional issues. It got to be a bit much sometimes.
The critical reception of her “Cinders” earned her a job as staff photographer for a local English-language weekly, and her work also appeared with regularity in HVG and other national publications. She closed the curtains again in disgust. “You know what I want?” she asked.
Melissa had heard this a hundred times before. One great photograph.
“I want to take one great photograph. Just one, that’s all. The kind of photo, like that Chinese student in front of the tanks at Tiananmen Square or the colonel shooting a Vietcong prisoner in the head. The kind of photograph that can take the symbolic — you know, something universal — and make it specific enough to tell a story about one particular moment in history. Make it iconic. Close your eyes.”
The words didn’t register quickly enough: Melanie was staring into one of the light boxes, humming along with the opera in her head and growing steadily more nervous, when Nanette switched it on. Melanie yelped.
“Oh, my bad. You O.K.?” Nan asked.
“No, I’m good,” Melanie said.
Blindness took over, then panic, then the room emerged from a thick red gauze. Her headache swelled into allegro con brio and she considered going into the water closet — where she swore she could still smell gasoline — and make herself throw up just to be done with the hangover. Even as her eyes cleared, the white after-image of the light box followed her view for several more minutes and projected itself onto everything she looked at, lending Nanette a ghostly appearance. For years afterwards, when Melanie would think of Nanette, she still pictured that glow around her.
Nan lifted a spinning saloon pianist’s stool and sat Melanie in the center of the room.
Even with her trained and perfect string-section posture, Mel’s hair fell past the wooden seat. Nan squeezed a few Polaroids first, which to Melanie weren’t any better than digital pictures, and let them collect in the camera’s mouth before they drooled onto the throw rug and formed puddles of changing color. Finishing the roll, Nan examined her compositions for a moment and, finding one or two that satisfied her, changed to the eight-by-ten. “I’ll need all my color later,” she said. “I hope black-and-white’s O.K.”
The bleak winter left bright windburns on Melanie’s complexion, which was soft and milky otherwise, except of course for the permanent bruise her violin left under her jawbone. Standing over her shoulder, Nan said something about how the contrast between her cheeks and blonde hair would come out well with a polarizer, or maybe a yellow filter. She used the tripod for the first couple, taking the traditional hands-folded portraits, Mel’s hair hanging over one shoulder. Then she shot from every possible angle: she snapped a photo, spun the stool a few degrees, snapped another, until Melanie traveled a full, woozy circle. She envisioned the freakish, pseudo-cubist collage of her own head that would result when Nanette assembled all the images, if she ever got around to it. The project required an entire roll, one Nan would need to develop carefully in the darkroom if she wanted every shot to match up right. Her sweaty, greasy-fingered editor at the newspaper would pay for the film and paper and developing fluids whether he knew it or not.
Nan unscrewed the camera from the tripod and started again with facials. She snapped them quickly, one by one, from every angle. “Hold on,” she said, leaving Melanie sitting there, then came back with a flannel sheet from the bed. Next, she opened the curtains again and used the scissors to slice a manhole-sized opening in the sheet, which she then hung over the curtain rod to allow a different, localized shape of dull light to leak through into the room. She had Melanie turn her chin back and forth rapidly until her hair fluttered around her head like in a shampoo commercial. Until she grew nauseous. More nauseous. Last night’s vodka had turned to battery acid in her stomach.
Nan made her sit perfectly still while she focused on minute details of her face. “You make a great subject,” she said. “I’d like to get a couple shots of your back.”
“Sure.” Melanie spun slowly around.
“Without your shirt.”
She didn’t stop to think about it. It was by no means the first time she had posed nude for Nanette. She peeled off her turtleneck and twisted her arms behind her back to snap off her bra. “Pants too?”
“Not unless you want.”
“I think I’ll keep them on.”
Nan plugged a fresh cartridge into the Polaroid and took more compositional studies before starting with an SLR equipped with a bulky automatic winder. She snapped the shutter, stepped back a few inches to incorporate more of Melanie in the viewfinder, listened for the whir of the winder, and squeezed again. She continued this until her back pressed against one of the CD cases. Melanie covered her breasts with two ropes of blonde hair. Nan tried to keep the mood jovial. “Life is so unfair,” she said. “Why is it again that you got such big tits and I didn’t get any?”
“It’s just blubber,” Melanie said, swearing to herself that this year, when it warmed up, would be the one in which when she finally got in shape.
Nanette reattached the eight-by-ten to the tripod and picked up another camera. “There’s a couple color shots left in here.” Losing herself in the gentle clicking of the shutter and the low, electric hum of the winder’s toccata-like rhythm, she glided around the room, firing at Melanie again and again, stopping only once to re-check her light meter and reload with more black-and-white. Melanie contorted herself into every conceivable pose, giggling and spinning in obedience with her photographer’s direction, trying to act natural. Whatever that meant. Their session continued for another twenty minutes before she grew cold in her fingers and nipples, even under the lights. She asked for permission to get dressed and pulled on her shirt again while Nanette put her stuff away. She never got around to using the Holga, which was by far the coolest camera in her roommate’s vast arsenal.