Lying In Bed (22 page)

It was like being at the beach or in the museum: Gideon, the room we were in, his work, the night, it was all disappearing and I was seeing a story play out behind my eyes.

Cole walked up from the direction of the house. It had been seven months since I’d seen him last, when he’d come home for Christmas. He was a sophomore at Cooper Union in Manhattan, living with a group of other art students in Greenwich Village and he looked older than he had in December. More sophisticated.

Cole always seemed as if he was from another world than mine. But it was more exaggerated now. His clothes were all black, even though it was summer, and his hair was more styled than anyone I knew. He looked like a movie star.

“Hi, Picasso,” he joked, using his pet name for me. I was always drawing, painting, working on some sort of art project, and he teased me about my seriousness. I was already obsessed with becoming a painter. Actually, my artistic passion was a bond between us since he was obsessed with making a name for himself as a photographer.

“Hi, Cole.” I had a private nickname for him but never had the nerve to use it. Instead, when he was around, I became quieter than usual, self-conscious and aware.

“Can I have some of those?” he asked after he’d already reached down into my basket and eaten three of the berries.

I laughed.

He had his Nikon around his neck. He wore it constantly. At meals, he took it off but hung it on his chair where he could feel its strap against his back.

Cole was looking at me as if he hadn’t noticed me before that afternoon, and I grew uncomfortable under his gaze.

“If you’re going to stand there, grab the basket and start picking,” I said, channeling my mother, knowing that’s what she would have said if she were there with us. “There are too many ripe berries. The sudden heat and everything.”

“You are putting me to work? You’re the midget.” Another nickname. Cole used them all the time. I hated midget. Almost as much as I loved Picasso.

I threw a berry at him and it landed splat on his face. He laughed and brushed the wet spot off his face, and then sucked on his fingers. “I can’t believe I forgot how good these were.” He picked up the basket and followed me, up and down the aisles of plantings.

“How have you been?” he asked.

“Good. I got the art prize at school this year.”

“I wouldn’t have expected anything less from my Picasso.”

Something thrilled in me - the use of the possessive - the intimate tone. I’d had three boyfriends that year, but none of them lasted for long. Eventually I started to compare them to Cole in my mind and none of them measured up. They weren’t as charming, as good looking, as worldly, as talented. My mother teased me about being picky, but she also let me know she liked that I was taking my time settling down with anyone. She didn’t know, no one knew, that I wasn’t taking my time. I’d chosen who I wanted to be with. He just didn’t know it yet.

And there was no way I was ever going to tell him.

My crush on Cole fit in with my overly romantic imaginings. He was the cruel and handsome hero of the books I read when I wasn’t painting. Max DeWinter in
Rebecca
. Mr. Rochester in
Jane Eyre
. Heathcliffe in
Wuthering Heights
. Jane Austen’s Mr. Darcy and D.H. Lawrence’s Mellors.

“You seem different,” he said after we’d picked a few dozen more berries.

I turned around. He was standing behind me. Camera up to his eyes, its lens trained on me.

Looking at someone who was looking at me with a camera was nothing new to me. My mother had been shooting me since I was an infant. My stepfather took pictures of us all. And when Cole was home, he did too. The three of them versus the two of us - my sister and I. She was going to be a writer. Nothing visual for her. I was going to paint. Create images the old fashioned way.

The sun was reflecting off a side button on the camera case; like a diamond, it gleamed.

Click. Click
.

It was nothing. No big deal. A snapshot. He took a few more.

And then I sensed something.

I’ve wondered about this for a long time. What was it? Something in Cole’s stance? Or was it his energy reaching out to me at a time when I was receptive to even the slightest shift in his mood from studying him too much.

I became self-conscious and brave at the same time. Shifting my hip, throwing out my chin, I posed for him for the first time. It wasn’t the same as standing still for my mother. Nor was it the same as the previous three or four shots had been.

Frozen, there in the sunshine, listening to hot summer sounds of the buzzing of the bees and the low thrum of the katydids, I watched him approach, retreat, circle, taking picture after picture. The shutter the only mechanical sound in the noisy field.

He’d take a shot, step forward, take a shot, step back, take a shot, step forward, all the while murmuring small sounds of encouragement, not so much words as non-verbal clues. A seductive music that I’d never heard before but responded to viscerally. I was in his eye. He was watching me. I could see myself reflected in the lens and I didn’t look like anyone I knew. I was tall and slim and I could tell that I looked sexy. I tried to look sexier. Not that I really knew what that meant… except that Cole was responding to it and I liked that. I wasn’t the midget anymore. I wasn’t Picasso the painter either. I was the woman who was the object of his attention.

He got so close that the camera was right up to my face. And finally, teasing and slightly insane in the way teenagers can be, not thinking, not caring, not worrying about what it meant or why I was doing it, I put a strawberry in my mouth the way a pin-up girl would.

His fingers flew out as fast as one of the summer mosquitoes and knocked it out.

My lips hurt as if I’d been stung. He dropped the camera around his neck and glared at me. “What are you doing?” he yelled.

“I… I… was only kidding around.”

“Don’t ever do that. Don’t ever ever do that!”

His eyes were bright and brilliant and his lips were almost white with anger. I was frightened but something else too. Excited that I’d elicited that kind of emotion in him.

“Do what?”

“Cheapen yourself like that. You looked like some little slut.”

I laughed. In his face. Where did that come from?

Whatever I was feeling had taken over.

He didn’t say anything but reached out and grabbed me and pulled me to him and then kissed me. Hard. In a way none of the boys I’d been with had even come close to. My imagination kicked in. It wasn’t just Cole kissing me. It was Heathcliffe. It was a man. It was Rhett Butler. It was all my fantasies coming to life. And with his lips on top of mine, I opened my mouth.

After the kiss, he brought the camera back up and he shot me. He kissed me again. Then he took another photograph. He made my lips swollen and then documented them.

I took strawberries and smeared them on my mouth.

He licked them off and then photographed the bits that were left.

He pulled off my shirt and touched my breasts streaking strawberry juice on them. He licked that off too. Then photographed what was left of the stain.

I don’t know what excited him more; the shots he was getting or what we were doing.

Well, I do know. Now I know. But I didn’t then.

I stopped talking
. This was very different than the stories I’d invented in the process of doing my job. I’d told Gideon more than I’d planned to. It wasn’t enough of an excuse that talking to him was so different than most of the people I’d met.

Why?

The way he listened was like an embrace. His certitude that what I had to say was important to him. The eye contact he made and that, once made, he never broke.

He had no agenda. He simply was there to listen to what I wanted to tell him.

Despite my silence, he continued to sit still, his head slightly cocked to one side and somehow his energy reached across the room, accepting me, cajoling me into telling him more things I’d never told anyone. Yes, it happened each time we’d worked on one of the erotic stories, but the way it happened again that night was different.

When I didn’t continue talking he took my hand and held it in his. His skin was warm and dry.

“How long did it go on?”

“Three years.”

“Were you in love with him?”

“Yes. Too much. So much so that I didn’t see what was going on. I missed all the clues.”

“What was going on?”

“I…. I thought…” I couldn’t tell him. It was too personal. Sure what I’d already told him was personal, but what had happened afterward was also humiliating.

“I’m not going to judge you, Marlowe.”

“When you sculpt, when you have people pose for you…” I gestured towards the silent giants that filled the rest of the large space. “How much of the real people do you capture?”

“Capture? You make it sound as if I’m raping them.” He thought and then answered. “I learn from them and try to glean something from them that I can add to my work to make it more about humanity and less about artifact.”

He had been watching my face when he spoke. “Why did that make you grimace?”

I didn’t know what to say. Any answer I gave would be too revealing.

Gideon didn’t move. He wasn’t in a hurry. He didn’t pressure me. And it was that lack of determination, that worked on me. I kept thinking that it would be a relief to finally tell someone who might actually understand what I was talking about. I’d never met anyone before who’d have any insight into the odd relationship that a model has with an artist, that an artist has with a muse. But he might.

“Did you ever use any of your lovers as your models?

He hesitated. There was a serious look in his eyes as if he knew that the crux of my problem was tied up in this question and he wanted to give me an answer that would help.

The CD he had put on when we’d gotten to the loft had stopped playing. From the swish, swish of cars driving by in the street, I suddenly realized it was raining outside.

“I have asked two of the women I’ve been with to pose for me. One was self-conscious and couldn’t. The other did but I still haven’t finished that piece. It was complicated to know someone that well and not use what I knew about her – by way of our private relationship - in the sculpture. And that would have been unfair to her. To us. To what we’d meant to each other. I only use the outer shell of people who pose for me. I don’t go traipsing through their souls. And that’s what finishing that sculpture would have been. I use models to give me the muscle and bones. The heart, the themes, the meaning–” He put his free hand on his chest. “That comes from me.”

I took a deep breath. Started wishing that Cole– and then stopped. There was nothing to be gained by thinking about that.

“Cole did the opposite of what you do. He only wanted to get to the private part of me. The sexual part. He needed to have a relationship with me so that I’d open up to him and he could take the kind of pictures he wanted. He was like Rasputin. Lulling, mesmerizing, getting me to open to him so he could steal what he needed from me. And then as soon as I wanted it to stop – it was over.”

“You mean as soon as you wanted to stop the relationship he–”

I was talking too fast and too loudly when I interrupted him but I didn’t care. I was explaining it finally and I wanted to get it out there and away from me. I kept thinking if I said it maybe it would stop mattering so much. Maybe the show wouldn’t scare me so much.

“No. As soon as I asked him to stop talking the pictures… when I finally had had enough of them… when I finally started to worry about what he was going to do with them… he broke off the relationship with me. He ended it. What he loved wasn’t ever me. Or us. God, how I wished it was. I wanted it to be. He was in love with having his very own private poser. His very own model who would let him explore his art on her body.”

“Damn him.”

That was all he said, but he’d said it with so much disgust and vehemence it was enough.

I nodded.

“And you were 16 when it started?”

“Yes, and 19 when it ended.”

“What a prick.”

“It gets worse.”

“What?”

“I don’t know if… Damn, it doesn’t matter anymore. No. It does. It still does matter. Two years ago I met someone and started seeing him seriously and the fact of the photos being out there bothered me. I went and asked Cole to give me the negatives. Or to destroy them. He refused. We fought. I didn’t let up. He didn’t give in. We stopped talking. I’ve been dreading seeing any of those shots show up in print. I never did.

“But now, in ten days, he’s having his first one-man show. And I saw the invitation. I have it here—”

I grabbed for my bag, opened it and pulled out the worn, torn postcard and handed it to him.

Gideon looked down at the black and white photograph of the woman’s open mouth. The lips moist and swollen. The unmistakable expression of passion. And the mark on her cheek. It was a smear of strawberry juice - but only if you know that’s what you are looking for.

Gideon knew.

“This is you.” He didn’t ask but I nodded anyway.

“He’s showing the photographs. He’s showing me. To anyone who wants to see. And there’s nothing I can do about it. Everything about me that’s private will be public. On display. Sexually. Out there.”

I was sure of it. Certain that no one could do anything. Certainly, I couldn’t. I knew Cole. Knew how much his career meant to him, knew nothing else mattered.

Except the expression on Gideon’s face was saying something else.

We sat in
the darkened living room for a few minutes without speaking. I didn’t know what to say. I felt depleted. Having put the story into words and spoken them had left me with a deeper sense of anger than I’d felt before. And at the same time, a deeper sense of sadness.

“Do you want to take a walk? Get out of here?”

I nodded.

When we reached the street he took my arm and practically led me the three blocks to a French Bistro called Lucky Strike. I’d been to the dark-paneled, crowded restaurant before and its noisy familiarity was welcome.