There’s got to be something in the pictures that she’s not recalling. She pulls the plug from the drain and stands up, grabs the towel off the radiator and starts to dry herself. She goes into the bedroom and turns on the lamp on the nightstand. She grabs her jeans, holds them out to step into them and catches her reflection in the mirror above the bureau.
She tosses the jeans back on the bed, opens the bottom drawer and paws through T-shirts and pajamas and night-gowns. And then she feels the lace and pulls out what she’s looking for. It’s a full-length English nightdress, all sheer cotton trimmed with Battenburg lace, with this deep V-neck that can be secured by buttons at the neck, and long, ruffled cuffs and a flounced hem and a thigh-high side slit. It’s probably the most elegant thing she’s ever owned. It was a present from Perry. Way back. Near the beginning, when they couldn’t keep their hands off each other.
They went away for a weekend. It was near the end of winter and they drove into the Berkshires and stayed at this ancient Victorian inn. They were the only guests and they arrived around midnight. The woman who ran the place had left the door open and the room keys on the front desk along with a note that told them to lock up. They climbed a double-wide staircase past walls lined with dark oil portraits of people long dead. They moved down a narrow corridor until they found the Rose Room, small but with a huge brass bed and complimentary brandy in a crystal decanter. Sylvia went into the bathroom and Perry went for the bags. When she came out, he was still gone, but there was a gift box on the bed wrapped in thick floral-print paper. She sat down next to it and opened it slowly, folded back all the thin, white tissue paper and pulled up this nightgown. She remembers staring at it for what seemed like too long, running her fingers over the lacework around the collar. She remembers gathering it up against her chest, going to the door and peeking out into the hallway, looking for Perry and not finding him. Then she went back into the bathroom and put it on and it fit as if she’d picked it out herself. She stood in front of the mirror. She actually combed her hair for a few minutes. She remembers putting a single drop of perfume on her wrist. When she opened the bathroom door, Perry was sitting on the edge of the bed with just his jeans on, facing her, holding a cognac in one hand and a small bouquet of sweetheart roses and baby’s breath in the other. He held them out to her and says, “I was afraid they’d freeze in the trunk.” But they hadn’t and she took them from him and didn’t know what to say. He stood up and whispered, “Do you like it?” and she just nodded. Then he took the bouquet out of her hand and put it on the bureau, took her hand and led her over to an antique chaise longue in the corner of the room, this heavy velvet lounge chair that Sylvia just sank into. He stood back and looked at her and smiled and nodded, held up a finger to say one minute, went over to the camera bag and took out the Canon. Sylvia started to shake her head and made herself stop as Perry focused the lens, then stopped, put the camera on the bed, stepped forward, and raised the hem of the nightgown until it was just above her bent knee. His hand lingered a second and she remembers how it felt as he let his fingers touch the back of her thigh, still innocent, just above the knee, but on this soft part of her skin that sent a wave through her, jangled the rhythm of her breath a little. Then he stepped back and slowly shot off an entire roll of film. And halfway through the roll, without any provocation from Perry, Sylvia pulled the hem just slightly higher on her leg. And Perry stopped for a second and closed his eyes, then went back to shooting. When he finished, he moved to the other side of the room and rebagged the camera. Then he stood up and stared at her as he pulled off his jeans. Sylvia sat there and stared back. There was a long moment after his pants were on the floor and neither one of them was moving, this wonderful, onetime, aching tension, this palpable atmosphere that, even as it engulfs you, you know you’ll probably never capture again.
Perry came to the lounge, lifted her up, set her down on the brass bed, but never removed the nightgown, simply raised it above her waist
They made love that night in a way they’ve never repeated. Not an athletic endurance or a primal, dank kind of fierceness, but more a kind of trance state, filled with an intensity and a surety, an absolute correctness and a limitless empathy as if each knew exactly when to move and when not to, when to stroke, kiss, breathe. As if for the whole of that night in that room, they couldn’t make a mistake. They couldn’t be less than flawless for each other.
Or at least that’s how Sylvia remembers it.
She doesn’t know what Perry’s memories are. They haven’t discussed that night, as if they have a shared understanding that words could easily damage it.
The pictures never came out. And Sylvia knew they wouldn’t at the time Perry was taking them. He hadn’t used a flash and the speed wasn’t slow enough to compensate for the dimness of the room.
She’s glad those pictures don’t exist. She still has a very clear, very sharp idea of what she looked like in this night-gown. She loves that image of herself. It’s the only instant, the only image she has of herself as totally desirable. As completely sure of and comfortable with her own sensuality. And she knows more than half that idea, that image, is imagined. It’s a story. It’s a fabrication, more altered then true, more created than any airbrush could manage. And she wants to hold onto it forever.
She slides the nightgown on over her head. She pushes her arms down through the sleeves. She buttons the three pearls at the neck. Then she goes to the closet instead of the mirror, searches until she finds a virgin pair of white ballet slippers and slides them on her feet. She goes out to the kitchen, takes the key off the nail on the side lip of the molding, goes out the back door, locks up behind her, and replaces the key.
She heads down to the cellar, down into the darkroom, trying to keep the nightgown from touching the stairs or the rock and mortar walls that are covered with a hundred years of soot and grit. She gets inside the darkroom, turns on the white light, gathers up all the Propp pictures and spreads them on the worktable. She pulls the step stool up to the table. She grabs the magnifying glass and the softest dust brush she’s got. Then she bears down. She leans in over the first photograph until it fills her field of vision. She tried to break down the shot, divide it into separate quadrants, first by simple mapping, what lies to the upper right, lower left. Then by the fall of the light in the photo. Then by the shifting fields of focus. Then arbitrarily, wherever her eye takes her, she seizes on that section of the photograph. She looks at each small piece under the glass. She takes her time, burns the image in. She looks again, immediately, with her bare eye, her face less than an arm’s length from the paper. Then she climbs up onto the step stool and looks down from above. She changes the position of the light. She cuts the glare. She adds some glare. She brushes the shot clean. She rebrushes it. She gets up, takes it to the drying line, clips it steady and stands in front of it, six inches away, two feet away, four feet away. She squats down and looks up at it. Finally, she turns it upside down, rotates it on the drying clips at different angle stops until she’s come a full circle.
Then she repeats the process with photo number two. With number three and number four.
Time blurs until she hears the noise. It sounds like a cat scratching its claws over something harsh. Like a wire screen. She thinks for a second that it might be the furnace. Perry fills it with water once a week for Mrs. Acker. But the furnace still makes a knocking or rumbling sound.
Sylvia steps outside the darkroom, immediately hears it more loudly, turns to the cellar window and sees a face staring in at her. She keeps herself from screaming but starts to run for the stairway when she hears her name and stops. She looks again and now the face is exposed, lit up by a flashlight at its chin, and she sees Leni Pauline shaking her head and laughing.