I’ve made my living at cheesecake, when there weren’t “art” jobs or fashion layouts handy, and I know damned well what it looks like from every crotch-crazy angle you can think of. So I should have known better … it shouldn’t have stopped me.
But that’s just what she did. She stopped me flat.
I just stared at her, sitting there in the afternoon, with the feeble sun breaking through overhead, and the bench cool and green under her round bottom, and the skirt up just a bit so I could see her knees didn’t show bones, but were smooth and firm and flesh-colored.
She was like nothing I’d ever seen before. She was the answer to every cheesecaker’s dream.
She just looked like she wanted to lie down on the grass.
With me. With the Good Humor Man. With the park attendant. With anybody.
You’ve probably seen pictures in magazines of girls like that. They just look more natural prone than vertical. They seem to be saying with their eyes and their mouths and the lines of their bodies, “Let me lie down … I want to be horizontal.” Well, she was like that, only more so, only much more so. She looked … well … the only word I could come up with was hungry . Yeah, that was it, hungry . She looked like she hadn’t had a certain kind of meal in a helluva long time.
She was about five-feet-six, with hair that sent back the weak rays of the sun in a brilliant red explosion. Her hair wasn’t the brassy, carroty red so many women think is hotcha; it was a delicate sort of amber, with highlights of black and streakers of deep crimson in it. It was hair that came down around her shoulders; and she tossed it out of her face with an eloquent twist of her shoulders.
I couldn’t see what color her eyes were, because they were closed. She was sitting there with her hands in her lap, and her head tilted back and to the side slightly, as though she was sleeping.
It was a nippy day, and yet she wore no coat. She had on a dark charcoal skirt and a pale blue poorboy jersey that stopped short of her upper arms. She must have been chilly as hell, but she wasn’t shivering.
I was glad she hadn’t worn that coat, because it gave me an uninterrupted view of her body. Now, ordinarily, in most women, no matter how skimpy or thin the clothing, there’s still a portion of the anatomy you can’t quite shape out in your mind. The under-breasts, the joint of the legs, the slide of the belly to the hips. But this girl was the next best thing to naked. Voluptuous. That was another word for her. Hungrily voluptuous. Voluptuously hungry. Either way, I could see the sharp molding of her breasts against the front of the jersey. I could see the sharp lines of indentation as the legs raced up to wide, rounded thighs, and plunged out of sight beneath her stomach. I could see her all, all of her, and it made me dizzy.
Have you ever experienced anything comparable? A roller coaster, doing forty push-ups, running a mile and a half in eleven minutes? All of them and others. This girl was the original Circe, the dyed-in-the-cotton-jersey siren.
I had to pose her.
I’m not bashful around women — my studio apartment has resounded long and loud to the outraged squeals of outraged models — but there was something about her that made me walk softly, on the balls of my feet, toward her.
Almost as though I’d tripped an electric eye as I approached, she sat up, and stared at me openly. I was stopped cold again. Her eyes were the most fantastic things I’d ever seen. They were like the first movement of Rimsky-Korsakov’s Le Coq D’or transposed from sound to solid. They were like two green-hot chunks of emerald, bathed by the heat of an exploding sun, and smoldering, smoldering. They were all the invitations and all the ecstasies and all the open accusations of a woman who wants to make love no matter what the cost. They were alone in their category. They were more than merely eyes. Eyes see … these spoke.
“Hello,” she said.
The voice couldn’t have been more right for her had it been taped and recorded in the Muscle Shoals sound studios, with all the acoustical tricks of an echo chamber built into her vocal cords. The voice came at me and cracked me across the mouth. When that girl said hello, so help me God, I bit my lip.
“Hi … I’m, uh, my name is Paul Shores. I’m a, uh, photographer, and I’m, uh, I was watching you. Has anyone ever —”
She smiled, and it was the oddest smile I’d ever seen; working up from one corner of her very red mouth, and abruptly splitting at me, showing two rows of perfectly white teeth, with the little canines peeking out sharp and pointy. The smile brought two spots of color to her cheeks, and they looked almost unnatural in the setting of fine alabaster flesh. Her face was a study-composite in red and pale pink. The kind of complexion they meant when they said peaches-and-cream, with none of the sick look of soggy peaches.
She finished my sentence for me. “Has anyone ever told me I was pretty enough to be a model? Yes, Mr. Shores, any number of times, and any number of people.”
The smile continued, as though she were mocking me, and I was so embarrassed I turned to leave, without even excusing myself.
I got one step away, and I felt her hand slip through my arm. “I’d love to pose for you,” she said. I looked down at her.
She was serious, goddammit! Absolutely serious about posing for a total stranger.
“But why?” I asked. “You don’t know me from Ad —”
“Adam was much fatter than you,” she replied with a pixie grin replacing the smile. “And besides, I think I can trust you. Any man who can afford a Leica doesn’t have to pick up girls in the park.”
I was surprised that she recognized my camera, and even more surprised at her logic which, crazy as it was in an era when you can buy a hot Hasselblad on most street corners for sixty bucks, sounded logical. Nuts, but logical.
So we were off. In a little while most of my tongue-tootled attitude wore off, and I found I could speak almost coherently. I posed her in front of a statue of Pulaski; I posed her on a bench with her skirt up a bit; I posed her playing with two little children and their bastard-hound; I must have taken ten rolls of color on her before she took my hand and led me out of the park.
“Where are we going?” I asked, feeling foolish as hell. A man is supposed to be master of these situations, and I felt like a Pekingese on a leash.
“You have a studio, don’t you?” she inquired demurely.
I guess I hobbled my head stupidly in agreement, because the next time I took a breath, we were leaving the cab in front of my building, downtown, and the doorman was holding open the door for us, staring at her, just staring.
The minute she got inside the door to my studio, the first thing she said was, “My name is Nedra. May I take off my clothes?”
What the hell do you say? Sure you can take off your clothes.