He said, “Well, sure, I suppose—” and she cut in to suggest that I come along and watch a photographic session.
“You futz around in the darkroom all the time, you might as well get acquainted with all sides of the photography business. Isn’t that right, Greg?”
“You really think so?”
“Why not?”
“Well, it’s fine with me, keed.”
“It’s certainly fine with me.”
“If you say so.”
“Because this would be a dumb time for modesty, I certainly think.”
“If you say so.”
“And Chip’s practically one of the family, aren’t you, honey?”
I listened to all of this without saying anything. I suppose you figured it out a long time ago, but then you’re sitting down somewhere reading it all at once, while I was living it a little at a time. I knew there was a lot going on that I wasn’t getting, but that was as far as I could go with it. I was lost, and waiting for someone to find me.
So we walked the couple of blocks to the office suite. It was empty except for a little guy at one of the desks who was catching up with his bookkeeping. He looked up when we came in and then looked down again. We ignored him and went into the studio. Gregor locked the door.
He set up his equipment and arranged various lights and things, explaining it all to me as he did it. I didn’t catch much of what he was saying because I was too busy trying to figure out what I was missing.
Then he was ready, and Aileen gave an odd little smile and got up on top of this dark green velvet couch. She gave a tug and lifted her dress up over her head and tossed it across the room out of camera range.
There was nothing under it but Aileen.
Oh, I thought. Nude pictures. Cheesecake, so to speak. Now I understood.
But not entirely.
“It’s a mutual thing we’ve got going.” Aileen said, spreading her legs. “It’s actually a beautiful relationship, Chip. See, Greg takes my picture, and in return I take his.”
I looked at Greg. He was buried under the black cloth and looked as though he was part of the camera apparatus. I looked at Aileen again. She had her hands between her legs, one on each side of what I was looking at.
“Only I have a built-in camera,” she was saying, “and I don’t have to futz around with floodlights or exposure settings. I just take aim and snap away. Say cheese, Greg.”
Greg didn’t say anything. I suppose he was still under the hood.
I wasn’t looking at him, actually.
My mouth was as dry as a sand sandwich and I had this weird chilly sweat all over my hands and feet and under my arms. And I couldn’t quite catch my breath, and I couldn’t stop shaking all over, and I couldn’t take my eyes off the most fantastic thing I had ever seen in my life.
The shutter worked.
“Click!” Aileen said.
Chapter four
For a little over an hour i stood there with my eyes falling out of my head while Gregor took filthy pictures of his wife. After her opening round of flashy repartee, Aileen didn’t have anything to say. Gregor stayed under the black cloth, and stayed quiet. And believe me, I didn’t say word one. A lot of things came to mind, I’ll admit, but I kept them to myself.
One idea that I couldn’t get out of my head was that this was all a dream, and if that was so, I had to be very careful not to do anything to wake myself up before the dream turned wet. Because dream or no, I was in what you might term a state of advanced physical excitement.
It was really fantastic.
I don’t know if I can clue you in as to just what it was like in that little room. (Which is probably a pretty dumb thing for me to say, for Pete’s sake, because I’m supposed to be writing this, and if I can’t handle it, that means I’m wasting both our time, and that it’s going to be a long siege of Maine sardines and day-old bread.) Seriously, I could try to put down all the poses Aileen struck and to say which ones made me the horniest and all, and if I did this, well, you might begin to get your own idea of what it was like in there, but I’m not all that certain it would add up to anything.
Well, just as an idea of the whole approach the two of them had, this was how Gregor used up one particular roll of film. He did several rolls of individual series work, which came to an even dozen pictures, which would eventually get wrapped up and sold together, and which would tell some vague sort of a story.
This particular one was the banana series, and it started off with a muffled voice from under the black cloth saying, “The banana, keed.” At which point Aileen got off the couch, went to Gregor’s bag of tricks, found a pair of ripe bananas, and got back on the couch.
I remember seeing those pictures, the banana set, after they were developed and printed. And if you hit them in order and were in the frame of mind to believe them, it really looked as though old Aileen was getting her cookies that way. It was pretty realistic.
Only an hour or so had passed when Gregor came up for air. His forehead was dripping with sweat. I guess it was pretty hot under the black cloth. It wasn’t all that cool anywhere else in the room, either.
“Wraps it up,” he said. He dug his cigarettes out of his shirt pocket, lit one for himself, and offered the pack to me. I shook my head. Some people are just physically incapable of believing that some other people don’t smoke. He tossed the pack and the matches to Aileen and she lit up and tossed them back. It was all very casual, almost athletic, with all of this underhand lobbing of cigarette packs and matchbooks. You could almost forget that Aileen was stark naked, and that she had spent the past hour holding her labia open and sucking on her own nipples and sticking bananas up herself. (I don’t know if I ought to be quite that graphic about it, but that was what she was doing, and I think it would be worse to try being coy about it, for Pete’s sake. I mean, if you’re going to come right out and say that a woman posed for a batch of dirty pictures while you stood there watching, you might as well call a spade a spade, right?)
Aileen blew out a cloud of smoke. She said, “Is that all you want to shoot?”
“I think so, yeah.”
“I thought you were going to take some pornographic ones.”
I didn’t do an enormous double take on that line. I just thought I was hearing wrong.
But he said, “Hard-core? No, the sonofabitching timer is on the fritz. I don’t know what’s the matter with it. Less than two years old and it just went. Nothing works anymore and nobody gives a damn. The whole civilization is coming apart at the seams.”
I must have looked puzzled. Aileen said, “It’s a timer on the shutter. He sets up the shot and then he has fifteen seconds to get in the picture with me.”
“Twelve seconds,” Gregor said.
She ignored the correction. “That way we can do the more interesting things, Chip. What you could call hard-core pornography.”
I nodded.
“What we shot now tonight is called soft-core.”
“What’s the difference?”
“Redeeming social importance,” Gregor said.
“Huh?”
“That’s what the Supreme Court calls it. You know, that you can argue it’s a work of art and not a hundred percent obscene. If you actually show people fucking, then it’s considered a hundred percent obscene.”
“In hard-core pornography,” Aileen said, “the man’s core is hard.”
“That’s an old gag,” Gregor said.
“Professional humor,” she said.
“But the point is that the timer is on the bum.” He sucked on his cigarette and clucked his tongue pensively. “I’ll tell you something, you wouldn’t believe what a short time twelve seconds is until you tried to set up a shot and then get in it yourself. You know the worst part?”