The final shot of the report was one of Hubert’s paintings that showed a heavyset fortyish woman washing her foot in a sink. She was standing on one leg, the other was up. With one hand she was holding her ankle, with the other she was washing her foot. The fingers and toes were interlaced in a complicated way. Although the pose looked demanding, the woman seemed introverted, almost meditative.
Then they were back in the studio. Gillian and Hubert were facing each other for the interview. She had a few questions from her editor that she had written on index cards. She asked him about working with models, whether he gave them instructions or not. The movements need to be their own, said Hubert, that’s actually not all that easy to achieve. I tell a woman to wash herself, and suddenly she’s got her foot up in the sink. It would never have occurred to me. It’s like a gift. Gillian saw herself smile and heard herself asking whether it was difficult to work with women who had no modeling experience. She stopped the shot. Now she looked disgusted. She clicked on until Hubert was next in a shot. The expression on his face was hard to interpret, a mixture of irony and sadness, or perhaps just conceit. She hit Play, and Hubert — as though coming out of a deep pause for thought — said, on the contrary. Professional models are practiced at reducing themselves to their bodies and wearing nudity like a garment. It’s striking how some women change through being naked, and my looking at them. How the inside comes to the surface. It’s a very private moment. Gillian had the sense he was saying these sentences specifically to her and not thinking of the TV audience at all.
Oftentimes nothing happens at all, he said. Generally I know before developing them whether the photographs will be any good, whether there’s something useful there. Then who’s the artist, you or the model? Gillian heard herself asking. It’s not about the artist, said Hubert, it’s about the work of art. And that has nothing to do with the model or the artist.
Gillian ran the recording back to the beginning and watched the whole interview again, frame by frame. She wanted to work out what had transpired between them. Ninety seconds, more than two thousand individual shots. The secret lives of our bodies, she thought. Hubert was a chatterbox, which made it all the more striking to her that he had said what she was thinking, or perhaps had even given her the thought in the first place. She had often caught herself adopting other people’s ideas and taking them for her own.
The dialog between their two faces was very different from the one she had just listened to. From the outset there seemed to be a tense intimacy between them, often a barely perceptible smile flickered over one of their faces, and once at least Gillian caught admiration in her eyes, a girlish beam. Hubert’s initial boredom gradually gave way to an expression of tenderness, which struck Gillian. Her own face in countershot looked down, as though his look confused her. She turned to face a different camera, and her face took on a rather foolish look of surprise and delight — she was introducing the next segment. Gillian stopped the film and took the DVD out of the player. On TV, it was still the horseshoe crabs, which were now back in their native element, water. And so each year they lay their eggs, said the warm voice of the speaker, and probably will continue to do so long after human beings have vanished from the face of the earth.
Gillian spent almost the whole day lying on the floor in the living room. Gradually she calmed down. She thought she was gaining strength, but when she pulled herself up, she felt dizzy. She sat there for a while and waited for it to pass. Then she picked up her crutches, which were lying beside her, and got up. It was easier than she expected, and she hobbled into the kitchen and ate a can of tuna and a couple of rice cakes she had bought months ago and hated. She drank a glass of Prosecco, even though the doctor had told her to stay away from alcohol while she was taking medications.
She went to the bathroom and opened her side of the medicine cabinet, which was stuffed with over-the-counter remedies and personal hygiene products. The woman who lived here was evidently terrified of bad breath, she gulped vitamins, presumably because she had a poor diet, she suffered from chronic headaches and an acid stomach. She was afraid of getting old and of cracked fingernails. A working woman who had more money than time, who bought expensive olive oil soaps in little boutiques and didn’t get around to using them, and new toothbrushes before she threw away her old ones. It occurred to her that at last she would have enough room for all her stuff. Somehow she couldn’t feel properly sad about Matthias. Sometimes she cried and cried without stopping. At other times she completely forgot that he was gone. They were always spending a day or two apart, being alone wasn’t an effort. Gillian hadn’t even been to his funeral, how could she know he was really dead?
She took off her blouse and bra. Looking down herself, it was easy to imagine nothing had happened. The accident had left her with a couple of bruises on her torso and some stitches on one leg, but other than that there were no signs on her body. Then she raised her head and looked at her face. In the hospital all she had seen were the wounds. What she saw now, over an almost intact body, took all her strength away. Her stomach knotted, and she crumpled to the floor. She crawled to the bedroom on all fours and flopped into bed. She felt her naked body, belly, waist, hips.
In the middle of the night Gillian awoke and couldn’t go back to sleep. She got up and hobbled over to her office. She turned on the computer and went through her e-mails. She had more than three hundred items in her in-box. She quickly scanned the subject lines. Get well. Recovery. Sympathies. Forthcoming meetings and, days later, summaries of what had been said at them. She deleted all the messages. The in-box of her other address, the alias under which she had corresponded with Hubert, was empty. She Googled her name. Apart from a few short news reports about the accident, she found mentions of her TV show, a couple of articles that had appeared about her, a Wikipedia entry that some fan of hers must have posted, which was surprisingly accurate. She wondered how much longer you lived on in the Internet after you were dead. In a blog she came across a longish analysis of her work as a host. The blogger seemed to have a deep loathing for her. Her first thought was that it had to have been written by a man, but as she read on she saw that it was certainly the work of a woman. It sounded as though the author had met her personally, perhaps she was an artist or an arts worker Gillian had interviewed. When someone laid into her in the press, she at least knew who it was. Now she had the feeling of listening at the door of a room where she was being talked about. You won’t please everyone, Matthias said sometimes when she had been criticized, but that wasn’t it. She had never learned to keep a distinction between her work and herself, whoever criticized what she did attacked her as a person. At the bottom of the blog, comments were solicited. There were a couple of brief entries, broadly in agreement with the blogger, semiliterate statements full of misspellings and obscenities. Gillian briefly wondered whether to write something herself but decided against. She turned off the computer and opened the top drawer of her desk. The envelope containing the photographs was still there where she had left it.