In the end, Ellsworth printed one of the barn photos: “UNSIGHTLY LANDMARK TO VANISH SOON.” But in the photo it was not unsightly. Gordon’s lens had so intimately caressed the structure’s ancient decrepitude one felt a compelling attachment to it, as though only now, in the fullest realization of its potential for rot and purposelessness, had it achieved its true beauty, its true meaning. The ruined barn lay, agonizing, against the white sky, Ellsworth realized with horror and fascination, like a dying body on a bed, like Gordon’s own mother, her mind long gone, empty as the loft of that dusty old barn, dying alone in her room above the photo shop that early spring under the steady morose gaze of Gordon’s cameras and lamps, the very reason Ellsworth was trying to keep his friend busy and out of the studio so much of the time. Ellsworth did not understand these photos Gordon was taking of his mother, now little more than a pathetic defecating vegetable. Gordon’s father had died in the war, she had raised him, had been all Gordon had of family. “Didn’t you love her?” he would ask. He remembered how, timidly, she would interrupt their play with cold milk and a tray of cookies, freshly baked. “Of course I loved her. I still do.” Gordon was photographing the poor addled creature, head to foot, back to front, over and over again through the months and days of her progressive decline, contorting her shriveled limbs into bizarre attitudes as though in bitter mockery of the classic poses (he insisted no mockery of any kind was intended), but focusing mostly on her collapsing face, her gaping mouth, her blankly staring eyes. Ellsworth had sat through one of these sessions, but only one, he could take no more. The theme of the day seemed to be armpits. His own, as he watched his ponderous friend, eye locked to viewfinder, bear relentlessly down, felt moldy and perishable. The woman was diapered and her legs were covered with a sheet, so at least he didn’t have to look at the bottom part, what he saw was sickening enough. Her breathing was shallow and raspy, punctuated by little snorts and grunts, but apparently unrelated to the awkward posturings her son was subjecting her to, just little mechanical tics and toes, like the creaks and knocks one heard in an old house. Or an old barn. Ellsworth proudly eschewed the moral position in art and life alike, especially around Gordon, so he could not openly say what was truly disturbing him, could not even admit it wholly to himself, and instead deflected his acute distress into an argument about artistic principles. This, damn it, was not beautiful. “Maybe not,” shrugged Gordon, framing armpit, chin, and nostrils, one shrunken breast, “but it might be. And if it can’t be, then beauty can’t be either. That’s all. Now do me a favor, Ell, and hold her arm up beside her cheek like this, see — come on, just take hold of the wrist here and hold it straight up, so that — Ell—? Where are you going?”
These photos, taken some time before she had met her photographer husband, were among those Pauline showed to Otis many years later, long after her own first modeling experience and Duwayne’s ruckus and arrest and her marriage, long after their periodic visits to the old trailer that followed over the years like a strange recurrent dream, interrupted finally by the death of the car dealer’s wife and Otis’s solemn promise to the Virgin, a promise he managed to keep for over three years, and then did not really break, not at first anyway, he and Pauline becoming friends again but only that, meeting for coffee now and then, enjoying relaxed comfortable chats like an old couple who had got used to each other. Otis was vaguely tempted at times maybe, his cock stirring faintly inside his stiff gray gabardines as though it had a memory of its own, a wayward thought it was trying fitfully to express, but he was able to keep things under control, and anyway Pauline, pushing thirty, was not quite the looker she used to be, especially in the midmorning glare coming through the plateglass window of the old Sixth Street Cafe, where they usually sat. No, he now saw Pauline from time to time, but he could still look the Virgin in the eye. Pauline had told him a lot of stories during these talks, some pretty disturbing ones, given the kind of life she’d had, poor kid, one in particular about the night before John’s wedding, back when Otis was away at war, that Otis didn’t know whether he should believe or not, and she had mentioned the photos several times before Otis finally realized that there was something about them that frightened her, a woman not easily frightened, and that he should maybe have a look. So, one morning when Gordon was busy all day at the high school taking senior class portraits, Pauline led Otis into the back of the shop and opened up the locked cabinets. There were hundreds of albums back there, an amazing sight (of course, he was a dogged fellow, her husband, turning up everywhere with his shoulderbag of fancy gear and rolls upon rolls of film, and he’d been at it for a quarter of a century, after all), but she went straight for the ones she wanted him to see. The pornographic photographs of the naked old lady Pauline showed him were pretty disgusting, all right, especially when Otis realized that the old thing was still more or less alive and must have been posing for that fruitcake, or been made to, but they were not, by themselves, what had upset Pauline. Pauline had told him about Gordon’s early photo sessions with her, how she had explained what she wanted but how Gordon didn’t seem to hear, how he wouldn’t even let her take her clothes off at first, but insisted on shooting nothing but her face, and how she had to admit later he had found a kind of quizzical beauty on a face she had never been all that proud of, but then how he had slowly begun to undress her, literally ripping her summer frock off strip by strip at first, as though unwrapping a present or peeling an apple (what she was worried about at the time, she said, was how she was going to get home after, and what Daddy Duwayne would say when he saw her), making her put some underwear on when he reached that part — she had come without any, but he had found an old yellowed bra somewhere, a petticoat, and some of those thick silky panties from the war years you sometimes saw at a rummage sale — and then working these things off her, inch by inch, photographing every step of the strip from every angle, favoring the close-up of course, yet never touching her, just pah-click, pah-click, pah-click with that camera until she had begun to feel something crawling over her, a real physical presence of some kind sliding over her body, exciting in a way, but scary too, and then how he had begun posing her on a bed in a room upstairs in all these odd positions, getting around at last, or so she thought, to those photos she had come asking him for in the first place, yet somehow not as sexy as she had hoped, weird even sometimes, like when he shot up into her nostrils or focused on her feet or on her Sodom-and-Gomorrah or her armpits. Now she showed Otis those photos, mostly huge blowups that turned her body into a kind of vast rolling landscape, gigantic in scale yet minute in its details, distant and dreamy as desert dunes yet intimate as a pubic freckle, a wet nipple, an anal pucker. And the point was, they were, many of them, exact positional replicas of his photos of the old lady. It was spooky. It was as though, you know, as though … But Otis by now was only half listening. He could not get his eyes off the giant enlargements of Pauline’s intimate parts. It was like some kind of magical voyage. He felt transported back to his childhood, until this moment all but forgotten, and to the stories of Merlin and Buck Rogers from the comicbooks, Sinbad and Plastic Man. So, when Pauline unzipped him, Otis knew he’d have to let the Virgin down.