'to me, right now, you are.'
'Is that why you like to photograph me all the time?' I thought a moment.
'Maybe I do that because you're safer for me that way?' She smiled.
'Safer?'
'Framed and packaged. Still.'
'Under control-isn't that what you mean?'
I didn't answer her, but I knew she was right, because I think then I was still a little bit afraid of her. She was so alive, attractive, so fascinating to me in the flesh. She was much safer on film, arrested in abstract black- and-white.
I glanced at her. She was looking at me with interest and curiosity.
And then with a growing confidence-I saw the transformation in her eyes.
'You're obsessed with me, aren't you?' she asked, quietly. I turned away.
'Aren't you, Geoffrey?'
I shook my head.
'You know I am.'
'And maybe more than that. I've felt something else these last few days.'
'What's that?' I asked, thinking I knew what she was going to say.
She smiled at me. Again I turned away.
'Hey, look at me! Why do you act like you're suffering so much?'
'Don't pity me, Kim.' I spread my palms.
'It's over. I give up.' I started toward the darkroom.
'What do you mean: 'give up'?' 'Take the proof sheets, mark the shots you like. Mail them back and I'll make you prints.'
She rushed to me.
'I don't pity you, Geoffrey. God! Can't you see? The attraction I feel. I can't keep away from you anymore.' She laced her hands behind my neck.
'I want you. Want you.' She pulled my face down and kissed me gently on the lips@ Suddenly all my tension eased away. I no longer had to rule, no longer had to be in control. We could become lovers, not merely model and photographer. The game between us had finally been resolved.
There was a storm that afternoon. The sun, which had been broiling the city through the day, disappeared behind a cloud. A few minutes later thunder rumbled. We made love as the rain beat upon the windows, sheets of it sweeping in from the Jersey side.
Again I felt I was in a trance. It was strange and marvelous to finally touch this person I had been examining so closely for so many days. Her body was familiar, as were her eyes, her smile, her scent. But still I didn't know her. As I reached to touch her I hoped her secret would be revealed.
Our first caresses were tentative, as if, like lovers who had yearned too long, we dared not move too fast. A moment later we were tearing at each other, licking, hungry, selfish. We clawed and feasted like rutting strangers, caring only to satisfy, devour. Rivulets of sweat ran down our bodies. Afterwards, when we were done, we lay together beneath the ceiling fan, panting, slick and sweet from sex. She placed her palm upon my chest and smiled the smile of discharged desire.
'I don't usually go to bed with my models,' I said.
'We've been much more than photographer and model, haven't we?' She stroked me.
'Poor Geoffrey, you thought you were looking for mystery, and all the time you were just wanting to be loved.'
Later she asked me if, during all the days of shooting, I had had fantasies about taking her to bed.
I shook my head.
'I was looking at you. But I was working out something inside myself.'
'Well, I had fantasies about you,' she said.
'Even from the start.'
'me.'
She giggled.
'Please.
'All right.' She licked her lips.
'Those first few minutes, when you made me strip and crawl-I obeyed, but inside I was fighting you very hard,'
'I knew that.'
'I had to, to protect myself. But I was also very turned on. So I developed all these lewd fantasies-jumping you, shredding your shirt, pulling you down to the floor, stuff like that.'
'Sounds like fun.'
'I had this one where I climbed on top of you, sat on your cock and rode you till you came. Then I took one of your cameras and pointed it at you as you shriveled down.'
'Oh God!'
'Yeah! I wanted to take pictures of your diminishing cock, laugh at you as I did. I wanted to demean you sexually. That would be my revenge.'
'You were really angry.'
'Oh, I was angry. Yes!'
'Now?'
'Not now. Now I've got what I want, wanted all the time.' She kissed me.
'Got you, Geoffrey boy. But still'-she showed me a look of greed-'you'd better watch out.'
It had been a long time since I'd felt so alive, perhaps not since the day I'd shot my Piet@. There was the same feeling of irrevocable destiny, of having arrived at an intersection that had somehow been ordained. There was a heap of negatives in my darkroom, showing the thousand faces of Kimberly Yates. But now I held her actual face between my hands. Examining her, peering into her eyes, I grew dizzy with fascination. Grasping her to me, pressing her against my chest, I felt the 'beating of her heart.
My sense of being in a trance continued through the night, as. did my feeling that what had happened between us was, in some way, unreal. I hadn't counted my exposures, but I had gone many hundreds past Weston's thirty. The question was: Had I seen Kim right, as Weston had seen that humble pepper, and, by his seeing, immortalized it forever?
When she left in the morning to go home, change,and attend an audition, I set to work in the darkroom to see what I had wrought. I spent the entire day making prints, not bothering to eat or answer the phone. When she returned at seven, I had eighteen big 16 x 20s and another ten 11 x 14S tacked up on the walls. When she walked in and saw them, she was stunned.
'Wow!' She gazed around. I kept quiet; I wanted her to look. I watched as she examined them, noting at first how surprised she was, and then how pleased by their cumulative effect. they weren't finished exhibition prints-just good work prints, good enough to show the potential of the negatives. I'd organized them, placing eight of the nudes together on one wall, ten of the big view camera portraits on another, and a third grouping, a selection of the many exteriors I'd shot when we'd worked outside with just the Leica.
When she finished looking, she turned to me.
'Oh, Geoffrey! They're wonderful.'
That felt good.
'Anything else?'
'Well, since you ask'-she looked at me slyly-'I think there's something more in them. Perhaps something even you don't see.'
'What's that?'
'Maybe love,' she said.
'Love and admiration.'
'Yes… maybe…' For I had seen that too, even in the proofs: that all my shots of her together were nearly as filled with obsessive love and awe as the famous paintings by Andrew Wyeth of his model Helga, or maybe even (and the thought was very humbling) the series of photographs taken over many years by Stieglitz of Georgia
