“What?” I managed to ask.
“Staying up. You know, erect.” His eyes dropped to his trouser front, and mine fought the impulse to follow. “When you set up with the camera and all, you know, your whole concentration is on technical matters. You don’t even think sex. You might have trouble believing this, but when I’m taking these pictures, there’s no difference in my mind whether I’m taking a picture of Aileen playing with herself or of the Chicago skyline. It’s all the same as far as I’m concerned.”
He was right. I had trouble believing this. I had seen the Chicago skyline, and I had seen Aileen playing with herself, and there was no chance I would ever get the two of them mixed up in my mind.
“So I set up a shot,” he went on, “and then I have to turn on the excitement so that I’ll get erect, and then rush rush rush to get into the right position before the sonofabitching shutter goes bang. It’s the most nerve-racking thing going. And the thing is, the way I like to work, you know, is to shoot as much film as fast as I can, just one picture after the other. Just keep watching through the viewer and click them off whenever the pose is right. And the same way, Aileen likes to get into the spirit of a sequence and let it build the right way.”
“To a climax,” she said, with a wink.
“Yeah, to a climax,” he said winklessly. “It’s the same as whatchamacallit, method acting. Living the part. Look, you don’t know the business, but I can tell you that if you looked at a set of the keed’s photos and a set of the average model, there would be all the difference in the world.” I had no trouble believing this. “The average girl, she’ll put on this sonofabitching mechanical smile that looks painted on her face, or maybe she’ll pout a little, and there’s nothing the least bit natural about it. Aileen, she’s something else. Sometimes I think she has, you know, a climax. Just going through the poses.”
“Sometimes,” she said, “she does.”
“But without the timer,” he said, and then he dropped his jaw a few inches and actually snapped his fingers. “Hey,” he said, as an imaginary lightbulb formed over his head. “Now why the hell didn’t I think of that before?”
“Of what?”
He pointed at me. “You,” he said. “You could take the pictures. You want to be a photographer, you got to start sooner or later.”
While I was busy not saying anything, Aileen said, “I’ve got a better idea. Chip’s a smart kid, but he doesn’t know anything about photography. You can’t expect him to have your touch with a camera.”
“Well, that’s true,” Gregor said.
“And anyway, I think the world’s getting tired of the same old pictures of you and me, honey. But suppose you take the pictures and Chip and I star in them?”
They had done this before, Aileen assured me. Twice, as a matter of fact, with a fellow who neither of them really knew very well, as another matter of fact. And it was really perfectly legitimate as far as she was concerned, because after all it wasn’t really sexual. Which was to say that they really didn’t do anything. They would just set up a shot and Gregor would shoot it and then they would swing into another position.
The other fellow never actually got inside of her, Gregor explained. And that, he said, was an absolute requirement as far as he was concerned. Because while he and Aileen might have a more liberal attitude in certain respects than the average married couple, in other respects they were what you might call old-fashioned, and one of the respects in which they were old-fashioned was that neither of them believed in having sex outside of marriage. He was absolutely faithful to Aileen, and she in turn was a hundred percent faithful to him, and that was the way it had to be.
The two of them took turns explaining these things and filling me in on the fine points of pornographic photography, and let me tell you, it was the weirdest conversation ever. I wasn’t tongue tied all the way through it, but I think I might as well have been. I would ask various dumb questions and they would chime in with the answers. Wouldn’t Gregor be upset just seeing me in these various poses with Aileen?
“No, keed, because I know it doesn’t mean anything and nothing’s really happening.”
Wouldn’t Aileen be embarrassed by doing that sort of thing in front of her husband?
“Embarrassed, Chip? I’ve got a huge streak of exhibitionism in me. You must have figured that out for yourself. If anything, I got a kind of a kick out of you watching just now, during the soft-core shots. And you know, honey, I like you, and Greg likes you, and if anything I think it would be kind of, you know, fun.”
Fun.
“We got time,” Gregor said. “We got all night here and in one of the darkrooms, and we can probably use both darkrooms if it comes to that because I don’t think the other one is booked at this hour. There would be a lot more dough if I had hard stuff for Mark. If you wanted to do it, well, I suppose I could pay you, and I don’t mean any of that buck-and-a-half-an-hour crap. I could afford, oh, what the hell, let’s say twenty bucks.”
“Greg, honey, how on earth can you be so damn cheap?” She turned to me and grinned conspiratorially. “He’ll pay you fifty dollars, Chip. How does that sound?”
After a few seconds passed, I realized we were all waiting for me to come up with an answer. “It sounds fine,” I squeaked. If my voice had been any higher they would have thought I wasn’t old enough for the job.
“Well, that’s fine,” Gregor said. “Fifty dollars — well, sure, I suppose so. The only question, and I guess nobody but you knows the answer, keed, if you know it yourself, is whether or not you’ll be able to perform. Most of the time you can fake it, you know, but some of the shots have to show you—”
“With a hard core,” Aileen put in. She rolled her eyes in exasperation. “Gawd,” she said. “Of all the stupid questions to ask him. He’s had the hardest core in America for the past hour and a half, haven’t you, honey? So I don’t think he’s going to have troubles now.”
We got things off to a sensational start by having Aileen put on her dress and shoes. And oddly enough the sight of her with clothes on really got to me. I’m not being sarcastic. I had just about gotten to the point where I was used to her being naked, and now that she had the dress on again I was taking it back off again mentally and remembering what she looked like without it and getting hornier than ever at the memory.
She sat down and patted the couch next to her, and I sat, and she looked at me and gave me a grin as big as O’Hare Airport. I don’t know if I can explain it, but when she grinned that way I knew that things were going to be all right, that this was my mother-sister-friend-landlady-sweetheart Aileen, and that we were going to have a little innocent fun together without anybody getting messed up. You may have trouble figuring out how she packed all that into a three-second grin, but it was all there and I read it loud and clear.
“Now the whole thing is to get into the part,” she said. “You tell yourself that you and I are crazy about each other and that I’m very desirable and we’re alone together and we’re going to make love. Don’t even think about the camera for now. It’s just a little clicking noise; it’s nothing to think about. And don’t worry about striking poses, or what angles Greg’s shooting from. Just get into the spirit of the thing and we’ll wind up with some decent shots.”
I thought, Decent? And then she puckered up invitingly, and I leaned forward, not too sure what came first, and we actually kissed.
That’s an understatement. We went right off the bat into a deep soul kiss, and not because it was my idea. I was too dumb to think of it, but before I could think of anything at all, her tongue was halfway down my throat and her breasts were pressing against me.