About a week or so later, Nick had decided, despite his subtle discomfort, to accept the invitation, his objections — although they weren’t really that — laid aside. That morning, by peculiar coincidence, Campbell thrust at Nick a handful of color photographs of himself and Faith on an almost empty beach. He had about him a faintly proud, uxorious air, as if he had said, “How do you like my beautiful wife?” Nick, nodding and smiling, as people will, looked through the photographs of the couple, both in swimsuits, both smiling disarming smiles. There were photos of the two of them together, embracing, mugging, wading in the surf; and shots of Campbell and Faith, each alone. She was very lovely, precisely the sort of young wife who would live, or so Nick thought, in some old New England house, no doubt one that her family had bought the young couple as a wedding gift. She was tall and slender, with a nicely formed, lithe body, long straight hair, glossy rich in the rich sun of the rich beach on which they were relaxing or “cavorting,” was the odd word that came to Nick unbidden. But in one photograph, which made Nick, in quick reaction, pull his head sharply back and raise his eyes to Campbell’s, then look down again, Faith stood, unsmiling, looking directly at the camera with what seemed an almost painful sexual intensity. Her hands were cupped beneath her breasts, which were half-out of her bra, in an offering. She was, Nick thought, Nick knew, offering him her breasts, and herself. This glaringly erotic image had been specifically made for him, of course it had. It had been posed by her and by Campbell for him! As he looked up again, Campbell, blushing to his hairline, was reaching for the pack of photographs, embarrassed, nervously laughing, reaching and saying something, saying, “Oh, hell, Nick, I didn’t mean for that one to be — it’s, you know, it’s, I’m sorry. It’s personal.” And he took the photographs back.
All right, so Nick thought, perhaps, it’s “personal,” but it was in the pack, part of the group, not removed for their own pleasures or uses. He was meant to see it. Campbell’s wife was audaciously offering him her body, he was meant to see her breasts, her sensual frown, he was meant to want her. He saw again the soft shadows that were the areolas of her nipples, she might as well have bared herself, for God’s sake. Nick knew, for certain, that Campbell wanted him to fuck his wife. And what would he do? Watch? Nick saw her slender fingers cradling her breasts. This is what Campbell wanted, but did Nick? He decided to wait and see if a weekend visit would come up again.
It did come up again, within a day or two, accompanied by a squeeze of his arm and a kind of maudlin testimonial to Faith’s expectations of his visit: Campbell was “afraid” he’d been “giving her an earful” about Nick. “Anyway,” he said, “I think we could have a hell of a lot of fun.” The photograph was not mentioned. Tomorrow, Nick thought, he’s more than likely to bring in a picture of his wife naked. He didn’t really believe this, nor did he by now believe that Campbell wanted him as a partner in a sexual adventure; he had come to accept Campbell’s assertion that the beach picture was indeed meant to be private and to stay private. He was, or so he told himself, getting a little weird. So he decided to tell Campbell that he’d try to get up to visit on the next weekend or the one after that. On that very day, as if scripted, Campbell brought in another photograph of Faith, this one taken, he was clear on this, especially for Nick. There she stood, sweet and obscene, pouting, in flower-print panties and white high heels, at the side of a king-size bed, an iced drink in one hand and the other curved lightly into her crotch. Behind her was a Boston Museum of Fine Arts poster of an Odilon Redon flower painting that echoed her insubstantial underwear. “Faith wanted me to give you this,” Campbell said. “Even though I wasn’t sure, you know … about it.” He colored slightly. “You, right? understand?”
Nick was nonplussed, to say the very least, by this, nonplussed and silenced, but aroused and tempted as well. Still, the new image of Faith, rather than pushing Nick into inviting himself to their house, pushed him back into procrastination. He was, as remarked, tempted, but repelled as well — it was all too eager and sweaty. And to complicate and blur matters, there was no way for him to know whether Faith had any notion of Campbell’s use of the photograph — of either of them. One might cynically say that Nick, at this point, could not or would not believe that this glorious woman knew that her husband was pimping her face and body, since he was half in love with this discreetly exhibitionistic phantom. It doesn’t really need to be said, but the very things that aroused and inflamed Nick were those that made him apprehensive and uneasy. He was no sexual innocent, and had his fair share, as it is said, of amorous adventures. But there was something just slightly off with this particular situation, something that lay just out of sight. And yet — there was Faith, or at least her image, waiting. Am I crazy about this woman I’ve never seen? Yes. Is she being offered to me like a whore? Yes. Why? I don’t know. Does she know or is she ignorant of her role? Who cares? So he simmered and stalled, half-witted with desire.
Campbell somewhat melodramatically pretended exasperation at Nick’s delay, but he was, in truth, deeply annoyed. Nick imagined him wondering “what else can I do?” But within a day or two, Nick proposed a tentative date, subject to change, oh yes, for his visit. From that very moment, Campbell said nothing more about Faith, nor did he bring in any more photographs. It is, by the way, to be noted that Nick had simply kept what he thought of as the “flower girl” photograph, and it joined the beach picture — which Campbell had silently left under Nick’s blotter pad — in his desk drawer. Neither of them mentioned this. Nick would, now and again, and against his better judgment, slyly look at the images that he had by now laid imaginative claim to, but Campbell pretended not to notice this. At any rate, he made no comments. As an indication of Nick’s shaky state of mind at this time, it’s pertinent to remark that he would not permit himself to take the photographs home, for that, he tortuously believed, would suggest the perverse. On the other hand, it had occurred to him to ask his estranged wife to accompany him on his suburban visit; or to tell her that he was in love again; or to send her copies of the photographs with an enclosed message of vile triumph. After these chimeras passed, he was half-certain that Campbell had turned him into an idiot.
Campbell, to repeat, did not mention Faith or the weekend or how lovely the cool evenings were on the lawn that looked down across dense woods to the river. He stopped “selling” the visit, and was careful not to say anything that might unsettle Nick. He had his plans, although they were more like hopes, as we’ll see. He did not know, however, the extent to which Nick was by now enthralled — besotted — by the images that he had memorized. As far as Campbell knew, the photos were erotically promising to Nick, suggestive of Faith’s “enlightenment,” as he might have said. But Nick, following the sad, trite script that is known by heart to half the world, felt a vast, contemptuous resentment of Campbell, who not only knew the breathless delight of sleeping with this Aphrodite, he had certainly and lasciviously subjected her — this adoring and trusting woman! — to his, to Nick’s gaze. This blithe contradiction held that Faith had bravely offered her body to the unknown yet noble Nick because she knew that she would immediately love him; but also that she was the unwilling subject of a lewd experiment that forced her modest self to be ogled and sullied by a stranger, the depraved Nick. He almost, but not quite, thought of Faith as the victim of “a terrible fate.” You see how addled he’d become. That Campbell had been changed into a rival for his own wife’s affections, her imagined sexual enthusiasms, was a notion that Nick never allowed fully to assert itself. It was — he knew this — absurd even to think of this woman whom he “knew” by means of two stiffly posed photographs, taken and revealed for reasons that were still obscure, and perhaps specious. Yet he could feel her breasts in his hands.