“Very simply, Sylvia, I need some photographs taken. I need a photographer on the staff. Someone with both taste and flair. Subtlety and a sense of originality.”
“You’re offering me a job?”
“Exactly. Yes. A position. There’s an opening in the organization and I’m extending it to you. You could learn quite a bit. I’m sure we could work out the financial particulars.”
“I don’t know what to say.” Something makes her want to take his offer.
Sylvia’s life this far should have exempted her from this entire situation. She’s getting a job offer from an Austrian pornographer. She doubts anyone she grew up with or went to school with can make this exact claim. And on the heels of this she realizes that maybe there’s something inherently subversive within her. Maybe something that’s been there all along. Because as much as she thinks she wants to get things right with Perry, to get back to the normal routine, there’s this other desire, this other knowledge that it would be a very real and very potent rush to sit opposite Perry over dinner, over that boring chicken and rice dish he loves so much, and somewhere in the midst of their lazy supper conversation, sometime after he’s run down everything that took place at Walpole & Lewis that day, she’d love to casually take a sip of wine and let it wash over her tongue and then clear her throat and look at Perry’s face and say, “Honey, I just took a job on a pornographic movie crew.”
“I’ll tell you what to say,” Hugo says, “you say ‘yes.’ Or at the very least you say ‘I think it over, Hugo.’”
“But, honestly, you’ve never seen anything I’ve done—”
He cuts her off. “Sylvia, please. You have to understand how I operate. When I’m in the restaurant. When I’m in the shopping plaza. When I’m in the balcony of the Palace’s lobby on two-for-one night and all the college boys and girls are walking in laughing and embarrassed and thrilled. And when I spot that face, that young and genuine countenance. That look that captures me, that sets off the alarms. Do I stop and say, ‘but can she act?’ Do I hesitate and wonder, ‘are there any unsightly blemishes I haven’t yet seen?’ No. Never. I approach them on the spot and I make them the offer. I tell them I’m a director. I tell them I wish to put them in a film. I may be rebuffed or even slapped. This has happened often. But that is fine. I’ve made the attempt. I’ve acted on the impulse. That is the nature of my work. The impulse. The instinctual sensation. I’m correct much more often than I’m wrong. Trust me, Sylvia, I don’t need to see your work.”
She shakes her head. She looks again at the set. The goddamn bed is so big you could get lost in it.
“Don’t you ever worry about the police?”
He gives a smug and icy smile.
“Shall we say,” he laughs, “that is but one line on the budget sheets.”
“You pay them off?”
Now he really lets loose with a laugh. “I will never lose my love of that innocent American bluntness.”
“I’m sorry,” she says.
“Not at all,” he says, then adds, “but my arrangement with our city fathers has nothing to do with your position.”
“Right. Of course,” she says. “What exactly would be my position?”
“We have a small portrait facility over in the Willi Forst Studio—”
“Willi Forst?” she says.
“Studio B,” he says. “On the other side of that wall. I sometimes film simultaneously. I pop back and forth between the two sets. I find it stimulating, keeping the story lines separate.”
She wants to ask what possible difference could it make if the story lines get confused. Instead she says, “So I’d be doing portrait work?”
“Believe me,” he says, “you can get very creative. I need poster shots for each film. Publicity stills of my stars. Marketing pamphlets for the conventions. This type of thing. You’d pick it all up very quickly, I have no doubt.”
“Mr. Schick—”
“Hugo, please.”
“Hugo, I really appreciate your offer. It’s really very nice of you. But the thing is, I just don’t have a lot of experience doing portrait work. I’m much more a landscape person. Street scenes, that kind of thing.”
“Like the incident yesterday.”
“Well, no,” she says. “Not really. That was a fluke. I happened to walk into it. And I happened to have my camera.”
Hugo sighs and smiles at her. “If you can stand in the middle of that tumult and focus in on individual scenes, my God, Sylvia. You can do my work in your sleep.”
“But there are very different techniques. You have to be good with people to do portrait work. You have to put them at ease, bring out their best face. Keep things natural. I’m not great in that area,” she pauses and adds, “especially not when the people are naked.”
He looks shocked. “Oh, that,” he says. “One hour, you won’t notice it. Trust me, it becomes irrelevant.”
“I find that hard to imagine.”
“Don’t decide yet,” Hugo says. “You go home. Sleep on it. Whatever you’re making now, I’ll increase your wage. And I’ll pay a bonus on your acceptance.”
“Hugo, really, you’re making this very tempting—”
“That’s my job,” he says with a nod.
“But I just don’t get it. There are a lot of photographers out there. You must know dozens who are already connected with your field. But you seem intent on hiring me, even though I’m not connected. You met me yesterday, for God sake. You don’t know if I’ll fit in. And you’ve never even seen my work.”
He sits and seems to consider what she’s said. Then he leans forward, clasps his hands together and balances the weight of his doughy body onto one knee. He lowers his voice and says, “I view your innocence, your industry-virginity, if you will, as a virtue rather than a deficit. I’m always looking for a new vision, Sylvia. A new way of taking in the image and a new way of giving it back. I think you can do that for me, Sylvia. And I know that if you choose not to I’ll be terribly disappointed.”
He seems so goddamn sincere. She’s ready to cave in right here in front of him. She’s ready to sign on with Team Hugo. She’s ready to load up the Aquinas and shoot a whole parade of naked bodies.
She says, “I promise I’ll give your offer every consideration.”
He sits back, sinks into the couch and crosses his legs. He holds his arms out in the air and says, “I suppose I can’t ask for more than that.”
As if on cue, Leni comes up from behind and puts her hands on Sylvia’s shoulders.
Hugo cocks his head back, looks up at her and says, “I’m very upset with you, Ms. Pauline.”
She leans down, hands still on Sylvia, and kisses the top of his bald skull. It’s possible she’s left the red imprint of her thick lips, but from this angle Sylvia can’t tell.
“You can spank me later,” Leni says and Hugo looks around with semi-mock exasperation.
The actors and crew start to file into the studio. Two men disrobe as soon as they’re in the door and start to walk toward the couch. Sylvia tries to stare at the floor.
“You’re welcome to stay and watch me work,” Hugo says, standing up.
Sylvia gets up and says, “I’ve really got to be going.”
He takes her arm and walks her to the foyer, then with almost a fatherly stroke, he gives her cheek a soft brush with the back of his hand and in a low voice he says, “I’ll wait for your decision, Sylvia. I know you’ll fit in perfectly here at the Palace.”
Without waiting for a response, he turns on his heels and heads back inside. Sylvia walks down the spiral staircase on shaky legs, thinking suddenly about what she’s going to make for Perry’s dinner.