Blind Side

by William Bayer

  When I explained to her my conviction that it was a prevailing sense of mystery that always characterized the best photographic portraits, she asked why this was so.

  "It's mystery that makes a portrait fascinating," I explained.

  "Without it a photograph is merely a picture. With mystery it becomes something else."

  "What?"

  "Sounds pretentious when you say it." :'Say it." 'It can become art."

  "So is that what you want to do-turn me into art?"

  "Wouldn't be so bad if I could bring it off, would it?"

  "Am I really so fascinating, Geof?"

  "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 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 da
ys 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 Fldwarf. 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 obelisk.

  The three of us talked awhile. Shadow was most admiring of my photographs. She said she thought the ones I, raits she'd d taken of Kim were among the best port ever seen.

  "Geoffrey didn't like me when we started out," Kim told her.

  "The first thing he did was tell me to undress

  Shadow smiled.

  "He meant just down to my underwear. But then I fooled him-I took off everything." Shadow's eyes enlarged.

  "Then- what happened?"

  "The poor man was totally embarrassed. Shadow was amused.

  "Is that true?" she asked me. I nodded.

  "It was a good move for both of us.', "I'd love it if you'd photo
graph me," Shadow said.

  "The guys I usually work with use me for a prop." I was hesitant.

  "Go on, Geof," Kim urged. "Why don't you give it a try?"

  I looked at them, they were both staring at me, waiting for a response. I nodded, crossed the room and started to load my Leica. My hands weren't shaking, but they weren't all that steady either. Then, when I heard Kim urge Shadow to take off her top, I turned around. "That's not necessary," I said.

  "No, I'd really like to," Shadow said.

  "I think it would loosen me up."

  She stood and pulled off her jersey. She turned to me.

  "You don't mind, do you?"

  I shrugged, She bent and took off her skirt. When she straightened up she looked fabulous, in her all-black lace bra, garter belt and stockings. Self-assured, totally elegant, the very opposite of "candy ass."

  As I set up the lights she and Kim joked around. Their girlish banter made me envy them their youth.

  I started slowly, working my way around Shadow, not giving commands as I had the first time with Kim. I liked her immediately, I could see she had a way with photographers, knew how to establish a fast rapport, and that she had the kind of face the camera loves, strong sculpted features and skin that can model light. She was a pro. Her moves were good. But I couldn't shoot her face. The only way I could photograph her was to cut her off at the neck and at the knees.

  I bluffed the scene out. My hands didn't shake and I managed by pretending I was shooting an advertisement for lingerie. I didn't think Shadow could tell I was avoiding her face, but I was badly disappointed. Though I had tten to the point where I could shoot intimate pictures of Kim, I realized I was still a long way from being cured.

  After half an hour, when I put my camera down, the three of us went out to eat. Shadow led us to a crazy place in Tribeca, a hangout for models and photographers. Here plastic Madonnas, model Statues of Liberty and other souvenir-shop knickknacks were mounted on pedestals and carefully lit. The point, I gathered, was to proclaim that if junk can be presented as art, it must therefore follow that art is junk.