O'Keeffe.
'But still.
'What, Geoffrey? What don't you like?'
'Oh, I like them. I know they're good.'
'Then what's the matter? There is something. Tell me.
'I keep thinking there's something missing,' I said.
'What? What could be missing?'
I thought about it.
'Maybe that final, single, powerful image. You know, the definitive portrait. The one that reveals- everything.
Over the next few days we burned white-hot, even as we fell into a routine. I'd spend my days alone in the darkroom, working up prints for the series, while she went out about her business, visiting modeling agencies, attending classes and auditions.
In the early evening she would come back to the studio, then we'd order in food or grab a simple meal in the neighborhood. Afterwards we'd talk awhile, pe ps lisrba ten to jazz or watch one of my old film noir videos.
She adored these old movies of trapped men and cunning women ensnared and made mad by passion, acting out stories of crime and punishment in dark forbidding cities. The strange monotone performances, the masklike faces, the chiaroscuro lighting and the mazes of deception in which the characters moved-all these things fascinated her, she asked me endless questions about them, and she had her own quite particular views: Re Double Indemnity: 'When do you think Barbara Stanwyck knows she's going to get Walter Neff to kill her husband?'
'Sometime between his first and second visits,' I suggested.
Kim shook her head.
'I think she knows the minute Neff walks into her house.'
Re The Big Sleep: 'That camera hidden in the Chinese head-could something like that really work?'
'Sure,' I said.
'If the lens were wide enough, and there was some way to trigger the shutter by remote control. Then you could photograph all the bad stuff taking place across the room.'
She nodded, she understood, but she didn't think the blackmail material was strong enough.
'The trouble with that movie is that the pictures aren't really incriminating. So I don't believe General Sternwood would feel forced to buy them back.'
'Has your body ever felt so good?' she asked, curling against me one night after we had made intoxicating love.
'You are a witch, aren't you?'
'Yes, I think I am… I was forty years old, I'd traveled the world, I'd had various girlfriends, and, in my hotshot photojournalist numer -night stand days, had enjoyed my share of one s. I'd lived with several women and been married once. But none of the women I'd known was as good in bed as Kim.
How to justify such a claim? Her skills went way beyond technique. It was the way she anticipated, sensed my every need. Yet everything she did seemed effortless and every time she touched me it was in a different way.
She took over some part of me, some passionate aspect I hadn't known since adolescence, toyed with it, then seized it and used it to make my body sing. Gentle or rough, rushing me or torturing me with pleasure over many hours, the sheer power of her lust would take me over, causing me to ache with desire. Then I was hers, wanting only to satisfy, to make her come and come again. But even as she induced me to race her toward her climax, she always paid me back tenfold.
Sex made me mad for her-and hungry for her all the time. Fearful too, sometimes, for even as I gave myself up to her, the feelings were almost too strong to bear. I wondered if I could sustain them, if there was danger in such abandon. But I ignored my fear, yielded to my passion, and, to keep sane, continued to photograph.
Photography: that was an important part of it. I could not stop taking pictures of her. Not that I ever wanted to. My obsession didn't lessen after we became lovers; rather it seemed to grow. What was I after? I know better than to think there can be such a thing as a perfect portrait. Looking back, I believe it had to do with mystery, because something in her refused to be caught. The mysterious quality I kept talking about, that I said I wanted to evoke around her in trait, was actually the mystery I already saw in her, a poor and desperately needed to solve. So I photographed her, hoping to solve it. In the early evening, when the light was sweet, she'd choose an area of the city, we'd go to it, I'd shoot a roll, and then we'd go on to dinner. Later I might pose her in the studio, squeeze off several shots of 4 x 5, and the same again in the morning before we parted for the day.
From one of those early morning sessions I produced a picture I liked very much: a long shot of her, nude, seated on a stool, staring off dreamily into space, Plenty of mystery in that picture, for it raised many questions: Who is this woman? What is she thinking? What is her relationship to the photographer?
In the background, barely visible, were the photographs of her I'd tacked to the walls, and the whole room was captured too, filled with sunlight broken by the wind blown blinds. Some of these bars of light were palpable, each holding a suspension of sparkling dust, while others striped her naked flesh, creating a pattern like a net or web.
One night, after making love, lying with my head by her feet, I discovered, fondling her, a small tattoo. It was on her ankle.
'Now, what have we got here?' I asked. to make her move so I could see it better, I ran my finger along the bottom of her foot.
'Hey! Quit that!' She grabbed my arm, laughed as she tried to twist away.
'Stay still!' I commanded, wrestling her leg back to the mattress, 'I want to read what this damn thing says.'
We were at that joyful early stage in a physical relationship where the reactions of the beloved's body are still unknown. Lately we'd been playing with mock-hurting each other-one of us bending the other's fingers or biting the other's ears to see if he/she could make him/ her beg for mercy and cry out. Kim introduced me to that form of play, which aroused me much more than I would have thought. Momentary exchanges of power, mild forcing, pretending to submit-when Kim discovered that such activities had an exponential effect upon my excitement, she began to introduce them frequently.
'Where'd you get this?' I asked. There were two linked circles etched in blue, each containing a letter. letters were pink. I made them out, the initials K and G. orida. A weird 'Oh, that old thing,' she said.
'In Fl dwarf.
Oriental tattoo artist did it. She was almost a 'K is for Kimberly,' I said.
'So who was G?' she wiggled her toes. 'Another person…
'A lover?' I bent her foot again. p that, Geoffrey! 'Ouch! Maybe…
Yes! A lover.
'Yes!
'Someone I should know about?'
She pulled her foot free, smiled mysteriously.
'Just a youthful error,' she said. Then, like a cat, she showed her teeth, and with a hiss attacked my neck. mate, who, she said, was a successful She had a room ere she'd model-at least in certain downtown circles won the hearts of several young designers.
'Her name's Cheryl Devereux,' Kim explained.
'But everyone calls her Shadow. She's famous for having once slapped a photographer who dared to call her 'candy ass.' -, from New Orleans, a dusky beauty. It's She's black because of her I haven't had you up to my apartment.'
Though I had dropped her off several times at her building, she had never invited me up because Shadow had a 'beau' who often slept over in her room. But still, I said, I would like to meet her friend, so late the following afternoon Kimberly brought her down on the pretext that I would shoot her portrait. I didn't think much about it until the two of them walked in. Then I grew worried. Yes, I'd been able to photograph Kimberly. But had I really broken through my block?
Shadow was stunning, almost six feet tall, thin, angular with a gorgeous cafe all lait complexion. Her voice was soft, classy-Southern, but her hair was very downtown cut into a geometric shape, it resembled a modified
