In a minute we managed to adopt the intimate, jocular tone we normally used with each other, and the picture-taking session went forward at a smart pace. Curry urged me to do things with my hands or chin, or to “approach and react to the couch,” in a pretentious, slightly British accent he had clearly picked up from watching David Hemmings in Blow-Up. The poses we tried were amusing or acrobatic rather than erotic: neither of us quite knew what to do with my naked body. When Philippa finally came in, pushing her long hair out of her face, smiling with her usual air of thin-blooded pleasure at seeing me, and looking unsurprised to find me crouching bare as a newt on top of the couch, I was glad enough to go back into the untidy bedroom and put my clothes on.
A couple of days later, in the Carpenter Center darkroom, Curry developed the rolls of film he had shot of me, and I came along to see the results. The pictures were all horrible. After my first shriek I was able to observe, objectively, that while the body of the girl in the photographs looked relaxed and normal, her face was subtly distorted and her neck strained, as if an invisible halter were dragging her backward.
“You were pretty nervous,” said Curry, clipping one enlargement up on a drying rack.
I looked at him, and he looked at me. We were very close together, closer than when our knees bumped occasionally under the dining tables at Winthrop House. In the red light his gold-rimmed glasses gleamed rosily, and his green plaid shirt looked black. The open neck of the shirt showed the tender-looking skin that stretched over his knobby collarbones, and for the first time since I had known him, with what was less a conscious thought than an impulse of my flesh, I was curious about how it would feel to touch his throat, his chest. At the same time I wondered briefly and coldly why Curry and I had never become lovers. The answer was fairly clear, as we stared at each other with eyes almost alike enough to be those of siblings, into faces that for each of us symbolized the unbearably familiar things of life.
Curry began to laugh and waved a handful of negatives under my nose. “I’ll sell ’em to you,” he said. “Let me have five thousand in unmarked bills, or prints go straight to your parents.” As he spoke, he was stuffing negatives, contact sheets, and two dry prints he had enlarged earlier into a manila envelope. “Here,” he said, handing it to me.
“I don’t want these.”
“Take them anyway.” He had stopped laughing and spoke in a sharper voice than he had ever used with me before; and, unaccountably, I felt tears start to my eyes. I took the envelope quickly, looking away from him.
We talked studiously about movies as we came out of the darkroom and walked up the gray driveway of Carpenter Center, and slowly I began to feel a lot better—relieved, as if an obscure crisis had passed. Across Kirkland Street the Memorial Church bell was ringing six o’clock. It had been a beautiful day, warmer than usual for April in Boston, and a yellow-green haze of budding trees hung over Harvard Yard. Kids were lounging on the steps of the libraries to catch the last of the waning sun, and Frisbee players shouted and leaped on the grass around the freshmen houses. In a single sunny afternoon the miracle had occurred that always galvanizes college campuses: summer, the shining irresponsible season that lies beyond the barrier of term papers and exams, had come into view.
I shifted my knapsack on my shoulders and reflected that summer meant commencement for Curry, who would then take off on his peculiar pilgrimage to eat feijoada among the Bahians, or whatever he intended to do. For me the summer meant the beginning of a time without my friend. This was something I thought of unhappily, but without tremendous perturbation, because I had the feeling that no matter what happened, I would always be running into Curry—that our particular bond of fascination and repulsion would bounce us together to resume, again and again, a dialogue that would always seem familiar, but never dull.
We walked through the Yard and paused at one of the gateways, where a friend of mine, a tall Jamaican kid named Hunter, was passing out leaflets praising revolutionary activity in the Third World. Across the street nine Hare Krishnas, looking uncharacteristically buoyant and chipper in the bright spring evening, were hopping and chanting in front of the Harvard Coop. Curry had to go: Philippa was taking him to see Yojimbo, and I had to camp out in the library to finish an overdue paper on Yeats. When I had said goodbye and started walking up toward the Radcliffe dorms, I heard footsteps behind me and turned around to find Curry, out of breath from the run.
“Hey, please don’t throw away those pictures!” he said, taking off his glasses, which had gotten fogged up with perspiration, and raking his fingers through his dark curls, which were standing up even more wildly than usual. With his glasses off, his little tear-shaped birthmark was clearly visible, and the sight of it was enough to dissolve any trace of the strange irritation and grief I had felt in the darkroom. “At least hang on to the negatives,” he went on. “Maybe I can try to shoot you again. I’d like to have something to work with.”
I promised him I would keep everything—but, in fact, at the first trash can I came to, on Garden Street, I had a change of heart and tossed in the manila envelope, negatives and all. When we were hanging out together in the next few weeks, I was afraid, once or twice, that he might try to
