Gordon had photos of the new pool, the old one as well and the one at the country club, but no bikini shots. Not even of Pauline. He did have a black-and-white picture of Clarissa’s mother, taken years ago at the country club pool, but in a modest one-piece swimsuit, tied at the neck and open at the back, not a bikini. Cheesecake, as it was called when he was a boy, was not Gordon’s fancy, not his artistic métier. Intimacy was. Sensuous intensity. Intimations of timelessness. And purity of line. In the photo of John’s wife, one of his favorites in an ongoing sequence begun nearly a quarter of a century ago, she is pulling herself up out of the pool near the low diving board, her bare back to the camera, one foot up on the concrete ledge, the other still in the water. Her hair is hidden inside a rubber bathing cap. Perhaps only Gordon would know who the swimmer was, but this very anonymity of his subject gratified him: an intricate arrangement of soft rounded glistening shapes, pure and clean and ultimately non-objective, unnameable, set against a severe geometry. Blowups of isolated fragments of this photo shared these qualities and recalled for him his earliest painterly pursuits, his speculative juxtapositions of hard and soft, line and texture, edge and surface. The pale dimpled membrane of the bathing cap, backgrounded by dark hedges and the chainlink fence at the pool’s outer border, provided impressions, when enlarged, of erotic moonscapes, set against an ominous cosmic grid, just as the potentially prurient and distracting crotch region, barely visible above the waterline and here at full stretch, lent itself with ease to tastefully harmonious studies in textural contrast, of which he had successfully attempted several. Gordon’s favorite area of the photo, however, was the bare back, and especially the glowing expanse of tensed wet flesh from braced right shoulder to lower left rib. He had explored this section inch by inch through long, infinitely pleasurable darkroom nights, emerging with a series of finished prints as near to his artistic ideals as any he had been able to achieve with a camera. In most of his pool photos, however, old and new, at least those mounted in his “Uninhabited Vistas” albums with their panoramic views of abandoned fields, empty parking lots, derelict drive-in movie theaters, windowed reflections of blank skies, and desolate dawn streets dampened with rain, there are no swimmers, and often as not there is no water either.
In another country club photograph, taken more recently, John’s wife, wearing a pale silk blouse later that evening to be dampened with gin, is receiving a lesson from the young golf pro on the proper way to grip a seven-iron. Her instructor is standing behind her, reaching around with both hands on hers and peering over her shoulder at the golf club she is holding, or at least down in that general direction. To get this shot, roughly three-quarters frontal, the photographer placed himself inside the caddy shack, just down the hill a hundred yards or so, and used a telephoto lens while focusing through an open window. Well, “placed himself” was perhaps misleading. He hid himself there. It was a surprisingly swift and covert maneuver. Trevor, watching discreetly from within the clubhouse lounge, almost missed it, remarking to himself, and not for the first time, that for a big man, outwardly clumsy, the photographer could move nimbly enough when he wanted to. Gordon, not a member, was a rare visitor to the club, here on this occasion ostensibly to photograph the new fleet of electric carts for the weekly newspaper, the old caddy shack now serving primarily as a garage for these vehicles, and his presence was odd enough that it caught Trevor’s attention, especially with John’s wife in the vicinity. So, with his own wife still out on the course somewhere, Trevor amused himself by keeping his eye on (“tailing” was the word, was it not?) the furtive cameraman. What possessed him to do this? Was it the same compulsion that gripped the photographer? Trevor didn’t think so, though they did hold in common the desire to see without being seen, and he thought Gordon might be struggling with something like his own wandering actuarial graph point. The difference between their quests was that between object and subject, outer and inner, visible behavior and hidden motive. There was something baldly suggestive about the way muscular young Kevin in his burgundy red golf shirt and yellow pants was embracing John’s wife from the rear, but Trevor doubted that Gordon saw in Kevin anything more than a visual irritant, an obstruction to an unimpeded view of the main target of his camera lens. Or anyway, this would be in accord with the general artistic principles expressed by Gordon in a Town Crier interview with his friend Ellsworth some years ago, principles and ideals that appealed to Trevor, for whom beauty and number were essentially synonymous, even as he doubted those ideals’ validity. Or even their possibility. It was that doubt now, he believed, that compelled him to shadow the photographer, as though the photographer were offering himself up as an arena for the display of the paradoxical inner drama of a necessarily conflicted soul in pursuit of an impossible ideal. Surface eruptions were inevitable, and Trevor, his own inner drama developing apace, would be their witness.
~ ~ ~
Curiously, there was, though he had no knowledge of Trevor’s pursuits and little enough of his friend Gordon’s, a character much like this in Ellsworth’s current novel-in-progress, The Artist and His Modeclass="underline" a mysterious unnamed personage, known simply at this point as the Stalker. Ellsworth had not invited him in, he had intruded upon the text unbidden. He was, so far, albeit deeply disturbing, no more than a minor figure, having made appearances only in one brief scene (which could get cut), a few unconnected fragments (in one, he asks the disconcerting question: How much does the child know?) and a handful of loose marginal notes, but he already posed a profound menace, not merely to the other characters in the novel (to wit, the Artist, his Model), but to the original plot as well, threatening it now with a total restructuring. Ellsworth had been seriously engaged with this book for over a decade, ever since words had failed him in the obituary of the car dealer’s wife, killed in an accident, and at one stage he had well over thirty pages which he considered “polished.” He had even had them set on the backshop linotype so as to contemplate them in printed form. Yes, they were fine. More than fine: classic. Then the Stalker crept in and, just by lurking obscurely at the edges, erased nearly half of them, and the twenty pages or so that remained, even if unchanged, no longer remotely resembled the twenty pages or so he had originally written. What did it mean, for example, to say that “The Artist, pondering the relationship between formal idealism and geometrical optics as he touched pen to paper, recognized that the triangle formed by his penpoint, the Model, sitting ten yards away, and his inner eye was in fact an equilateral one, but that when his stroke was untrue, or ink was spilled, or the Model started picking her nose, as she was doing now, it was not the equilaterality that was affected, but the triangle’s planeness,” when, suddenly, there was this other pair of eyes skulking about somewhere in the neighborhood? A debacle, as the great masters would say, but what could he do about it? When the Stalker first appeared and half his novel decomposed before his very eyes, Ellsworth panicked and, using all his authorial powers, forcibly threw the intruder out, restored the lost pages, and then added a few more (a productive period, though it proved illusory) as a kind of security fence around what he mistakenly thought of as his own private property, but all (he could have predicted this) to no avail. The Stalker was still there, inside the fence, which, far from keeping him out, served to encourage his interlopings, opening new pathways for him to explore, while yet hiding him from view. His Artist-character’s remark, responding to the naiveté of his overly admiring Model, that “artists do not ‘make’ art, my dear, but are made by it,” which Ellsworth had rejected as being overly melodramatic, now came back, in the person of the ineradicable Stalker, to haunt him.