As I set up the lights she and Kim joked around. Their girlish banter made me envy them their youth.
I started slowly, working my way around Shadow, not giving commands as I had the first time with Kim. I liked her immediately, I could see she had a way with photographers, knew how to establish a fast rapport, and that she had the kind of face the camera loves, strong sculpted features and skin that can model light. She was a pro. Her moves were good. But I couldn't shoot her face. The only way I could photograph her was to cut her off at the neck and at the knees.
I bluffed the scene out. My hands didn't shake and I managed by pretending I was shooting an advertisement for lingerie. I didn't think Shadow could tell I was avoiding her face, but I was badly disappointed.
Though I had tten to the point where I could shoot intimate pictures of Kim, I realized I was still a long way from being cured.
After half an hour, when I put my camera down, the three of us went out to eat. Shadow led us to a crazy place in Tribeca, a hangout for models and photographers. Here plastic Madonnas, model Statues of Liberty and other souvenir-shop knickknacks were mounted on pedestals and carefully lit. The point, I gathered, was to proclaim that if junk can be presented as art, it must therefore follow that art is junk.
Shadow was a regular there. People greeted her when we came in. Kim was greeted too, by a heavyset man at the bar with big sad eyes and gray wavy hair. She shrugged when I asked her who he was.
"Just one of your own, Geoffrey. Another photographer."
After we ate, Shadow excused herself. She had a late date, and had to go home to dress. When she was gone, Kim suggested we go on to one of the downtown clubs.
"I feel like dancing. For hours," she said dreamily.
"Maybe it's the age gap," I said, "but I hate those places. I really do."
"Oh, don't be such a stick, Geoffrey. It's time we had some fun."
"It wouldn't be fun for me," I said quietly.
"Something's the matter, isn't it?" She was staring closely at my eyes.
I shrugged.
"It didn't go well-the session, I mean." So she knew.
"No," I said, "it didn't go well."
"You looked like you were getting into it."
"I shot her body. I couldn't shoot her face."
"Well, that's a start at least. Next time it'll go better. It will.
You'll see."
"Maybe if she hadn't gotten undressed," I said.
"I think that distracted me."
"My fault, Geoffrey." She took my hand.
"I was worried when I saw you hesitate. I thought you needed a distraction. I'm sorry. I really am."
I think that may have been the moment that I fell in love with her, consciously at least. She was so sincere, solicitous, so sensitive to my needs. She'd seen I was in trouble and had tried her best to help.
"I'll tell Shadow you weren't satisfied," she said.
"I'll tell her you don't like to show work you don't think is good.
She'll understand. She'll respect you for it. Next time, and there will be a next time, Geoffrey, I'll bring her down and you'll do it like nothing was ever wrong at all…
In the taxi on the way back to my loft she told me she'd been invited to a dinner party by a painter friend and his wife.
"It could be amusing, but I don't want to go alone. I'm going to turn them down. Unless… well, if I could get you invited too, as my date"@he smiled"would you come? Would you, Geoffrey? Please."
I told her that of course I'd come, and that I'd love to meet her friends.
She kissed me, and when we got home she asked me to put on Double Indemnity again. She wanted, she said, to define for me the very moment when Barbara Stanwyck makes her decision to seduce and recruit Walter Neff.
The next hot, sticky Sunday I took her on an afternoon tour of Soho galleries. I wanted to see the work of various up-and-coming young photographers whose pictures had been touted lately as "photographic art."
I hated everything, and by the time we reached the last gallery I was so annoyed I swept her by the pictures fast.
She chased around after me.
"Hey! Stop! Let me look."
"Nothing here worth looking at," I muttered, guiding her to the door.
When we were out on the street, she turned to me, mad.
"What's the matter? I liked that stuff."
"All those perfect prints of sodomy!"
"Well, I kind of liked the style of them," she said.
"Sure, they're pretty. What he does, he applies 1930s fashion-glamour style to sleaze. The idea is to make ironic comment on the meaning of glamour. Assuming anyone's interested.
"Well, okay." She pouted for a moment.
"Whose work do you like? What about that Susan Kaufman's?"
"Her stuff's okay, but awfully easy. Take pictures of yourself standing in weird positions, then inscribe feminist slogans across the tops."
"Stan Kesten?"
I curled my lip.
"Hang out at beaches, airports, amusement parks, shoot snapshots while allowing yourself to be pushed around by the mob. All based on the no doubt sincere belief that by this false-naive technique you'll record the frantic rhythm of contemporary life."
"You're cruel, Geoffrey."
"Am I? That's what I'd call Johansen, the one Artforum says is such a corner. For me he's the most sinister."
"Sinister? Why?"
"On account of his approach, the smarmy way he goes into a suburb, then uses his camera to coldly trap the residents. Their hideous houses, gilded furniture, polyester clothing, overcooked food and mottled skin-all evidence of their pathetic aspirations, their mean and vulgar taste. Back in the darkroom he deliberately slops on chemicals to make his prints look ragged and handmade. He makes one print of each shot, destroys the negative, then encases the print in an incredibly expensive frame. The idea, you see, is that what is tasteless in someone else's house can be turned, by being photographed, into a precious tasteful artifact. The person who buys a Johansen buys cultural superiority. And by making each print unique, Johansen negates one of the great strengths of photography, which is that a photograph is endlessly reproducible.
She raised her eyebrows when I finished my tirade. It was a while before she spoke.
"Maybe you're right, Geoffrey. I trust your taste. But I worry about you when you talk like that. You sound bitter and ungenerous, as if you feel the success of younger artists takes something away from you. Thing is, I bet those kids consider you a hero, and I don't mean just for the PietA either. For your night scapes, your portraits, the pictures you've been taking of me if they could see them. You've told me art isn't a zero-sum game, that there's room in the galleries for anything that's good. You are good, Geoffrey. You know it too. Maybe you lack the ruthless streak it takes to make it in New York these days, But I think that's something I might be able to help you with…" God!
She knew how to make me feel good!
She got me an invitation to her dinner party, and whei we got there and I discovered who was giving it, I wa surprised-I hadn't known she moved in such exalted circles.
I Our hosts were the painter Harold Duquayne and his society wife, Amanda. Duquayne was famous, one of the young "New York heroics." It was alleged that he and Amanda were possessed by an insatiable craving for publicity. Certainly one read about them frequently enough. I had seen numerous photos of the pair, including one on the cover of New York that showed Duquayne, intense and bearded, clothing spattered with paint, glaring at the viewer while Amanda, wearing a black leather jumpsuit, gazed at him with sorrowful longing.
A recent Duquayne painting filled the background, instantly recognizable because all his work looked pretty much the same. He painted on an enormous scale, but his drawing was not very good, with the result that his canvases usually looked better in reproductions point made by several critics when they reviewed his midcareer show at the Whitney.