Kate could make out Samuel’s sharp shadow cast on the screen, and as he walked toward the class, his shadow grew larger and less distinct. Then he sat. She found an aisle seat in the top row and sat as well, glad for the darkness. The whir of the projector contributed to the warmth and safety of the room. She looked to her left and watched the spotlight growing from the booth, swirling with dust and whiteness, then distilling itself against the screen.
When he began speaking, Samuel’s voice sounded different from the way it had the night before; it was ten times more formal now, but it still bore a trace of genuine kindness that she knew she rarely revealed when she was teaching. He gave off an air of trustworthiness. That was when she realized the obvious: Samuel was like her father. He was like David. She was having more and more moments like this, moments when her past was on the tip of her tongue. She didn’t know what to do with this swelling past. For now she’d try to quell it and listen, for she was Kate Scott, and Kate Scott had been invited to attend this lecture. With a great surge of concentration, she leaned forward.
“We’re going to be doing something slightly different today, rewind a couple of millennia. Trust me that this will all hook in to what we’ve been talking about, even if it seems off the mark at first. Oh, and though she wasn’t able to be here today, I’d like to thank Professor Frasar from the art-history department for helping me put together this presentation. It’s a little out of my time frame, if you know what I mean.” A couple of girls twittered from the front row; Kate had watched them gushing over Samuel in the last few months. She knew they must discuss Professor Blake over meals: his forearms, how he adjusted his glasses, the way he tossed his jacket over the back of his chair. She blushed when she thought about the jacket and the last time she’d been near it.
“So.” Samuel pressed a button and an image clicked into place. A drawing of a settlement from above, as if reconstructed by an anthropologist. “Ancient Greece, about the third century B.C. Give or take. Let’s look at some of the images, the sculpture from that time, and I want each of you to think about what these images might do to people looking at them.” Samuel was silent for a while as he clicked through fifteen slides of nude sculpture, mostly of women standing. Kate could count ten or twelve seconds between each slide, and caught herself in the rhythm of the counting. When he got to the last one, he said, “Okay, someone get the lights,” and as the fluorescents came on, everyone groaned at the brightness. “Sorry about that, folks.” As the room rustled into activity, Samuel caught Kate’s eye and smiled. Then he handed out a pile of images. “These are the photocopied versions of what we just saw up there, but I wanted to give you a better perspective on how powerful that work is in its full glory. Does anyone want to start us off?”
A boy in front whom Kate had taken to calling the Dream Student raised his hand. “I guess what I’d notice first is how sensual those images are.” Samuel had no idea how good he had it.
Samuel smiled. “Okay, good. Sensual how?”
“Well, it’s not like they turned me on or anything”—general laughter erupted—“but I can tell that they might have had that power. To the Greeks.”
“The point here,” said Samuel, “is that those images do something to us even now, right? We recognize them as powerful even though they’re just carved from marble. But what about them makes them powerful?”
A girl on the left spoke without raising her hand. “They’re naked.”
“So?”
“So. The naked body is powerful.”
“Just to look at?”
“I don’t know. I guess so.”
Samuel walked over toward the girl. “Go on. I think you’re on to something.” Then he turned to the rest of the lecture hall. “Why is nakedness inherently powerful? Why does looking at a picture of someone naked do things to us?”
Another boy raised his hand. “I think it’s more complicated than that. I think these sculptures stand for more than just plain naked bodies, because someone chose to carve them. The sculptor wouldn’t have expended the effort if the statues didn’t have a deeper meaning.”
Over the past two months, Kate had been consistently impressed by how engaged these students were. With the exception of her one 300-level course, her lectures were routinely filled with drowsy, unprepared teenagers who were enticed by the idea of courtly love but didn’t want to deal with the difficulty of Middle English. She smiled to herself when she realized the sharp, focused intensity of today’s class might have something to do with the naked ladies Samuel had chosen to project. He had great instincts for luring students in, getting them excited about potentially boring subjects by dangling something tantalizing in front of their noses. Kate knew she lacked such salesmanship; certainly no such interest had accompanied her students’ discussion of The Friar’s Tale. Her yearly lecture on the Wife of Bath always assured one interesting discussion, but even that was nothing like this.
She could tell that Samuel was getting excited. His ideas filled him up, literally, like helium inflating a balloon. Suddenly he seemed lighter than them all, moving his arms in large circles of thought, nodding with comedic intensity. Even his feet seemed to barely graze the ground. He continued, “Okay, well, here’s the cool part. The ancient Greeks would use image—and not just sculpture like this, but also paintings—to aid them in certain things, especially conception. They believed that if you looked at a picture while engaged in the sexual act—or even if the picture was looking down on you while you and your husband or wife were making love—the picture would instill in the new life the picture’s virtues. They’d hang pictures of beautiful, nubile bodies over their beds not because, in a modern sense, those pictures ‘turned them on’—this wasn’t Playboy—but because they believed those pictures were so powerful that making love under them would create a new life and endow that new life with attri-butes like beauty, truth, and virtue.”
Samuel looked up at Kate and smiled. She blushed in the sharp recognition of his gaze. He’d asked her here to tell her something important. He’d covered that woman in her bedroom because he’d known they were about to do something powerful, and he’d wanted to keep a baby from her bed. Frenzy coursed into her. She flushed with possibility, with knowing she’d been right last night, that things had changed. Here was a man who understood something about the power of the face and body in a way she hadn’t heard anyone speak of it in a long time. She was filled with an urge so strong that she wanted to stand up, tell the students, “No more class today.” To push a disbelieving Samuel out of the room, into the hallway, and confide all her secrets. The lecture continued, but Kate didn’t listen, just watched Samuel’s soft hands move through the air.
She smiled at him from her distraction, from her knowledge that he was the one. She would unburden herself to him. He said to the class, “Not long ago, I was talking with a colleague. We were discussing the role that the unseen but beautifully imagined has on our consciousness. Like the Virgin Mary’s beautiful blue robes that appear in so many medieval paintings. Like the sculptures I just showed you.” Kate felt herself relaxing, joyful.
Samuel continued, “A painter paints something and makes it real to the beholder. But what happens in photography, when an image is captured on film? We are a culture savvy in visual interpretation. We look at a photograph and know that more or less, what we’re seeing is what actually happened. And that leads the imagination all over the place.
“This is why pornography works. When you look at porn, you know that somewhere, some woman actually posed for those pictures, knowing it would turn on her viewers.” There were titters, but Samuel went on. “This is the power and allure of the photograph: it’s personal. You look at a picture of that woman and know she’s chosen to share her body with you. This doesn’t even have to be about porn. How many times have you looked at a picture of a celebrity and believed it reveals something about them? The photograph is a supposed depiction of the real.”
Samuel cleared his throa
t, obviously waiting for the giggles to die down. When he had the room’s attention, it was as if the air were taut, expectant. Kate wondered what he had up his sleeve next. “If you’ve looked at your syllabus, you’ll realize that our next series of readings concerns the Ruth Handel photographs. You may be too young to remember this controversy, but you were alive when it happened. It’s an extremely important episode to consider as we continue our discussion on art in America. How many of you have heard of these pictures and the surrounding controversy? Good. Those of you who’ve been complaining about the relevance of all that theory I’ve been making you read, well, here it is. This is popular culture; a Vanity Fair article mentioned the case just last May. The Ruth Handel photographs were some of the first to draw a line in the sand between so-called defenders of the Constitution and so-called defenders of children’s causes. You may remember that the photographs in question were nudes of two girls given the pseudonyms May and Rose. One of those girls is dead. Ask yourself: is she dead because of Handel’s photographs?
“This is a course in cultural studies. I promised you an exploration into the role that culture plays in determining our personal, moral, and social responses to art. In light of that, let’s think about the Handel case in terms of the devastating effects of child pornography. Can nudity ever be innocent? Yes, of course it can. But what about the nudity of children in a culture that automatically associates nudity with sexual availability? What kind of people are we if we allow ourselves to forget what our culture expects of us? Those little girls had a father. Those photographs were taken by a woman who called herself a friend of the family. We have to ask: What is pornography? What is art? Can they ever be the same thing? Is the issue of intention even relevant? Does it matter when tragedy strikes? One hesitates to place blame on these adults, and yet where else can it lie? The tragedy and media blitz that ensued . . .”
Kate willed her legs to stand. All around her, the students were rapt, and Samuel, arrogant, compelling, sure of himself, talked on. But Kate couldn’t listen to him anymore. She got out of there and kept walking. When he looked up, she’d be gone.
chapter two
the first day in the studio with Ruth I’m still a little kid, only three years old. I’m so little I haven’t even ever seen a big camera until this day. Myla keeps looking at David like she’s tattling when I want to touch things like the paintbrushes or the heavy black paper boxes that fill up Ruth’s bookshelves. Myla doesn’t touch anything. She holds David’s hand and talks to Ruth. I don’t want to talk. I don’t want holding still.
Then Ruth comes over and says she wants to take our picture. David comes over too and says, “Remember how I told you about the beautiful photographs Ruth’s taken of all those horses?” and I nod like I know what he’s talking about, but I don’t remember at all. Then Myla and I go sit in a place that’s all white with umbrellas and a sheet that comes from the ceiling and spreads all out on the floor. I’m wearing my red shoes, the ones with the holes on top that I can squeeze my fingers in. The white around us makes me blink, and sun comes in the windows and patters our arms.
Myla is holding my hand and squeezes my fingers hard. “Don’t move.” She grips me, and then I see outside myself and realize I’m tapping my knees back and forth. I can even imagine how I’ll look if I hold still and smile. So I stop and I smile. David comes over and moves the hair out of my eyes. Myla pulls the ribbon tighter and straightens the bottom of my dress and then she stands up again and holds my hand.
Ruth says, “Prudence, did you know my kind of camera only sees things upside down?”
“Really?” asks Myla. I don’t understand. I let Myla talk for me.
“My camera is like your eye, except while your eye has one extra step built in, to turn pictures back to right side up, my camera doesn’t do that.”
“Does it have a name?” I ask.
“No,” says Ruth, “but you two can name it if you like.” All this time Ruth is bustling outside the whiteness, on the other side of the camera, carrying things back and forth. David is sitting on a stool watching us. “Okay,” says Ruth, “I think I’m ready. Now, you guys can hold hands if you like, but you don’t have to. You don’t even have to smile, as far as I’m concerned. Today we’ll just spend time letting you get to know the camera and how you want to seem in front of it. We’ll worry how the pictures look later on.”
David says, “Thanks for doing this, Ruth.”
She smiles. “Play the innocent all you want, David. Pretend you didn’t strong-arm me out of depression by promising artistic renaissance.” She stops. “But you’re right. I think Sarah would want them.” It’s strange to hear our mother’s name in Ruth’s mouth. I want to hear more. I look at Myla but she doesn’t look at me or even blink. Then Ruth says, “Okay now, Myla, just relax your face. Good.” Ruth presses a button and light bursts around us. It sounds loud and looks loud too. She moves us around and around each other for what feels like a whole day, bursting the light on us and clicking the eye in front of her. But it’s fun. Myla laughs and David laughs and Ruth laughs.
Even then I know it’s a beginning.
SOMEONE WAS POUNDING on the door and the sound wasn’t going away. It would stop for a few minutes or so and then the pounding would begin again. Kate heard a voice, but she didn’t want to listen, and she pulled the pillow farther over her head. She was a scary kind of hungover; even her feet flipped in a nausea accompanied by a sucking feeling of sickened hunger that made her head spin. She wanted to sleep more, to sleep, only sleep, but the pounding would begin again any second.
She heard the syllables of her name being called: “Kay-ate. Kath-ar-ine. Open up. Kay-ate.” The name seemed to belong to someone else, even though it was Mark’s voice calling it. She could hear that he was angry. She wondered if there were students gathered outside, hungry to see if Professor Scott had suffered a hysterical breakdown. She smiled in spite of herself. As liberal and coeducational as they strove to make themselves, these former women’s colleges couldn’t get away from hysteria, its inextricable gender, its derivation from the Greek word for “womb.” She raised her eyebrows and tried to make out shapes in the ceiling shadows. That diagnosis wasn’t too far off. “Insane” didn’t even begin to describe her. Soon she’d have to tell them.
She tried sitting up. The room swayed with her slightest motion, but she had to stop that pounding. She’d have to walk, and it seemed impossible. But she forced herself to stand, to move through the quaking in her hands, knees, and toes. And thinking about those parts of herself made her hum “Head, Shoulders, Knees, and Toes.” By the end of the first chorus, she was standing at the closet and had already tied her robe.
She stopped by the bathroom to vomit on her way to the door. It felt good, actually. As a girl she’d always fought against vomiting, even when she had the flu and everyone told her she’d feel better afterward. But now she relished feeling something, anything, even if what she felt was a lurching stab inside. She rinsed her mouth out at the sink and didn’t lift her eyes to meet Kate Scott’s face in the mirror.
Mark was still out there. He was back to calling her name. “Kate. Kate. Let me in. If you’re in there, let. Me. In. Kay-ate.” Then pound. Pound. Pound. She opened the door midpound, and he was stunned for a split second; then she saw rage paint itself over every inch of him. “You’re drunk.”
“No.” She backed up to let him in. Walking backward threw her off balance again, and she gripped the door. “Not exactly. Hungover.”
“Drunk,” he said as he pushed inside, and she didn’t know if he was addressing her or identifying her state.
“What can I do for you?” she asked, trying to smile to keep the room from swimming. She closed the door and gripped the handle, then leaned her head against the wood, resting, before turning around to look at Mark.
“We had dinner plans,” he clipped.
“Let’s go,” she said.
“Last night. It’s the afternoon. You missed yo
ur class.”
“Oh.” It was hard to stand. She slid down the doorway and sat propped up against it, her legs sprawling into the room. Then she said, “You should have called.”
“I tried to call. The phone rang for hours.” Kate vaguely remembered unplugging the phone the day before, in the early hours of drinking. Mark continued, “Then I came over. I knocked. I used my keys but couldn’t get in because you’d put up the chain. I threw rocks at your window.” He was looking angrier and angrier by the minute. “You’d put the chain up, so I knew you had to be in here. But then this morning I thought maybe someone had gotten in here with you. I made sure your car was still parked in its space. Samuel said the last time he saw you was at his lecture. We were going to call the police. Do you have any idea—”
“I’m sorry,” she said with as much emotion as she could muster. All she could remember was the bottle, standing in the middle of the room with Marcus Berger’s letter in one hand and the bottle in the other, and something soft playing on the CD player.
“Fuck you,” he said. “Don’t you dare say you’re sorry to me.” He started to move toward the door, but she was blocking it, and she wasn’t going to budge. He stopped in front of her, crossing his arms. “So you just got drunk.” He sounded let down.
“I’m sorry I didn’t do something more exciting, like getting abducted or raped or—”
“Why, Kate, why? Why do you do this to yourself?”
Kate shook her head, looking at the floor. “I don’t know.”
“You’re going to have to do better than that. For my sake. God, look at you. You’re disgusting.”
Kate nodded. “I know.”
“Don’t say you know. Don’t let me talk to you that way. Fight back.”
The Effects of Light Page 3