"Hey lady — slouch away." Worry stabbed at my insides while I tried to sound expansive and confident. "Do what thou wilt Sleep all day if that's your pleasure. Just wait till you discover what I've learned to cook in the last ten years. Real salads. Stuff you have to saute. Food with wine in it. I can artistically dish up all the squares you require. Loaf on the beach. Read my library. I have said it; it is good." I watched a glint of caution try to burn away the happiness in her eyes. She did so want to believe me. "And no more photographs. Promise. Anybody who tries has gotta shoot through yours truly."
She brightened at that. I'd gotten the reaction I wanted from her. It was the challenge-and-reward game. And god-damned if that tiny acid-drop of doubt didn't settle into my brain, sizzling — what if what if what if.
What if I was playing it safe because she might be right?
"I don't want to see those pictures," she said. "Don't even develop them."
"I'll toss 'em in the woodstove right now, if that's what you'd like." I'd made my point.
She gave a theatrical shudder. "Don't burn them. That's too much like a horror story I read once. I might shuffle off the coil along with my own pictures."
The rolls of film were lined up on my miscellaneous shelf downstairs, in the darkroom, the room with the red lightbulbs. Expose the film to anything but that mellow, crimson glow and it blanked into silver nitrate nothingness. The rolls could stay down there, sealed into their little black plastic vials. Forever, if that's what she wanted.
She kept watch on the sea while we destroyed our Continental breakfast. "I thought maybe we could brave the overcast later, and drive down past Point Pitt for dinner," I said. "Steaks, salads and a bottle or two of Cabernet. If anybody asks whether you're Tasha Vode, just blink and say, 'Who?'"
The life had surged back into her expression. "Maybe. Or maybe seafood. But I want you to do something for me, first."
"Your wish…"
"Don't you have any work to do today?"
Who were we kidding; I think we both knew I'd do almost anything she asked. "Nothing that can't wait."
"Then carry me back up to the bedroom."
My narrow little stairway was a tight shot, but we negotiated it successfully after a mild bump or two. Our robes got in the way, so we left them crumpled on the stairs about halfway up.
Her need for contact was vital.
Outside the bedroom window it got dark. I did not notice. All I could see was her.
Her eyes were capable of a breathtaking syllabary of expressions, and I felt my own eyes become lenses, trying to record them all. I stopped being friend or lover to be a camera, to trap what it was about her that made total strangers hear those jungle drums. There were thousands, maybe millions of men out there in the darkness, who fantasized about being inside her the way I was now, who played my role and spoke my half of the dialogue whenever they passed a newsstand. Their wanting never ceased.
Her eyes told me they knew what I was up to. They did not approve.
Her calling was one of the few that made you a veteran before puberty was done. If you lucked out, you'd become wealthy while still legally a child; if you weren't so lucky, you'd be left a burned-out has-been before you graduated high school. The attrition rate was worse than that for professional athletes, who could at least fall back on commercials for razors and lite beer when middle age called them out. But she did not seem the sort of human being who could relish the living death of celebrity game shows. Staying beautiful had been an unending war; each touchup a skirmish that stole away another irreclaimable chunk of time. Doing it for ten years, and staying the best, had been draining. Her outside was being used up. Her hipbones felt like flint arrowheads beneath soft tissue paper.
Her hand slid down and felt the cingulum cinched drawstring-tight above my balls. Comprehension dawned in her eyes, followed by that strange tolerance of hers for my various idiocies. I can't relate the exact sequence (to come was, for me, a necessary agony by now), but I was almost certain that her rapidfire contractions began the instant she slipped the knot of the cingulum. Unbound, I offloaded lavishly. Her fingers whitened with pressure on my shoulders, then relaxed, reddening with blood. I watched the pupils of those warm Arctic eyes expand hotly in the dimness as she took what was mine. Until that moment, her own orgasms had seemed insubstantial somehow. Disconnected from her. Spasms of her equipment more than sparky showers in her brain. Her breath had barely raised condensation on my skin. Now she came into focus, filled, flushed, and radiating heat.
After holding me for a lapse of time impossible to measure, she said, "Don't try to impress. You're not performing with a capital P." Her eyes saw that I had been intimidated by the imagined skills of her past decade of lovers, and thus the girdle cord trick. Stupid. "Don't you see? You're the only one who ever gave anything back."
"Tasha, you don't really believe that —»
"Try Claudia." It was not a command but a gentle urging. But it, too, was vital. "You're the only one who can give me back some of myself; replace what the others have taken. Give me more." Her reverent tone bordered on love — that word I could rarely force myself to speak, even frivolously.
Who better to give her back some of herself? I was a goddamn repository of her identity. With other women I had never bothered worrying, and so had never been befuddled as I was now. I'd made love to Claudia, not the exterior self that the rest of the world was busy eating. And now she was steering.
I gave her back to herself; her eyes said so, her voice said so, and I tried to hush the voice in my head that said I was not being compensated for this drain. I tried to ignore the numberless black canisters of film that beckoned me from the room with the red light. And later, past midnight, when the storm thundered in, I carefully took twice what I had given her. No matter how much we have, as Nicole the waitress would say, we always want more.
"Skull full of sparrow shit," she said the following day, as we bumped knees and elbows trying to dress for dinner. "Gorgeous but ditzy. Vacuous. Vapid. Pampered. Transient values. A real spoiled-rotten —»
"I think I get the stereotype," I said. "You're just not stupid enough to be happy as a model anymore, right?"
"Ex-model." She watched the sea bounce back the glare of late afternoon. "You don't believe me, do you?"
"What I believe scares the crap out of me." I tried to veneer what I said with good humor, to defang my fears. "I believe, for example, that you might be a ghost. And ghosts never stay."
She waggled her eyebrows. "I could haunt your lighthouse. Or maybe I'm just your wish-fulfillment."
"Don't laugh. I've often thought that I'm not really earning a living as a photographer." Merely speaking that last word caused the slightest hesitation in the natural flow of her movements; she was that sensitized to it. "I'm not really sleeping with Tas… uh, Claudia Katz." She caught that slip, too, but forgave it. "Actually, I'm really a dirtbag litter basket picker up in the Mission. And all of this is a hallucinatory fantasy I invented while loitering near a magazine rack with Tasha Vode's picture at hand, hm?"
"Ack," she said with mock horror. "You're one of them. The pod-folk."
"Are we gone, or what?"
She stepped back from the mirror, inside of a bulky, deep-blue ski sweater with maroon patterning, soft boots of grey suede, and black slacks so tight they made my groin ache. Her eyes filled up with me, and they were the aquamarine color of the sunlit ocean outside. "We're gone," she said, and led the way down the stairs.
I followed, thinking that when she left me again I'd at least have those hundreds of photographs of her in my bed. Ghosts never stay.