Chapter 1: Chapter 1
The envelope was propped against the salt shaker when Debbie came in from the kitchen with the last of the plates, and she stopped in the doorway with a dish towel over her shoulder and looked at it the way she might look at a spider on the tablecloth.
"What's that?"
Bob was already seated, hands flat on either side of his place-mat, watching her with the particular stillness of a man who has rehearsed a thing and is now terrified of it. He had shaved twice. She had noticed that an hour ago and had not asked him why.
"Happy anniversary," he said. "It's early. I know it's early. Three weeks."
She set the plates down. The chicken had gone a little dry at the edges and neither of them had said anything about it. Ten years and they had developed a kind of courtesy around small failures.
"Bob."
"Just open it."
She wiped her hands on the towel and did. Inside the envelope that had come from a stationer's, not from any store she would have guessed, was a card with a photograph on the front, soft and grey-gold: a woman's bare shoulder, a curtain, a window. Debbie turned it over. There was a card behind it, printed, a name she did not know and an address in the city, and under that, in Bob's square handwriting, a date and a time and the words already paid.
She read it twice. She read it a third time and it did not become anything other than what it was.
"What is this," she said, and it did not come out as a question.
"It's a portrait session. Boudoir." He said the word carefully, as though he had practiced the pronunciation. "The woman who does it, she's very good, she's been in the magazines. The girls at work, Ron's wife did one, she said it was, that it made her feel. You know." He moved his hand in a small circle that meant nothing. "Like herself again."
Debbie looked at the photograph on the front of the card again. The bare shoulder, the grey-gold light. She thought about the woman in her own bathroom mirror that morning, the pale ordinary geography of her, the softness she had spent years arranging under cardigans and shirts that buttoned to the throat. She thought about a stranger's hands adjusting a light.
"I don't want to be photographed," she said.
"They don't have to show anyone. It's for me. For us."
"That doesn't help."
The words came out flatter than she meant them, and she saw them land. Bob's face did a small thing, folded in at the corners and then smoothed again, and he picked up his fork and turned over a piece of chicken that did not need turning.
"All right," he said. "All right."
He did not argue. That was the trouble with Bob. He had never once in ten years argued, not really, not about anything that mattered. He would say all right and he would mean all right, and then he would go and be quietly disappointed at the sink with his back to her, rinsing, rinsing, and she would stand in the middle of the kitchen holding a piece of cardstock and feeling like the woman who had put out a light in someone's hands.
They ate. He told her about a problem with the truck. She told him about her mother's appointment on Thursday. The dishes were done. He watched the last innings of a game she did not follow, and she sat in the armchair with a magazine she did not read, and every few minutes one of them said something small and ordinary and the other one answered, and underneath it, all evening, the envelope lay on the sideboard where she had set it down, doing its quiet work.
At half past ten he came and kissed the top of her head. "Don't stay up," he said. "You've got the early thing tomorrow."
"Yes."
He went up. She heard the water running, the particular creak of the third stair, the bedroom door, and then nothing.
She sat a while longer with the magazine open on her knees. Then she got up and took the card into the kitchen and looked at it under the bright light over the sink, where everything looked like what it was. The studio had a name. Beneath the name it said, in small letters, a word she had to look at twice: confidence.
She put the card back in its envelope and the envelope in the drawer with the warranties and the takeout menus, the drawer where things went when they had no other home.
The next week was ordinary. Laundry, the Thursday appointment with her mother, a casserole for the church supper, Bob's shirts going up on the line and coming down stiff with wind. He did not mention the studio again. That was the thing about Bob, he never reopened a door he had been shown out of, and by the ordinary stretch of days their lives went on as though the envelope in the drawer did not exist. But she caught him at odd moments looking at her across the room with a softness that had an apology folded into it, or something like one, and she knew he was not thinking about the truck or the game or the casserole. He was thinking about the photograph on the front of the card, the bare shoulder, the grey-gold window, and about the fact that she had said no.
On Tuesday she called Anna.
"I need to ask you something. Bob got me a boudoir photo session. Not on the phone."
Anna, who had known her since ninth grade and who could read three words from her by the weight of them, said, "Bob's at work Thursday?"
"Days."
"I'll come by. I'll bring coffee."
She brought coffee and she brought Stacy.
Debbie had met Stacy twice, both times at Anna's, and had never quite got a foothold on her. She was tall and red-haired and wore a sundress in a season that did not warrant one, and she came through the front door already talking and did not stop until she was sitting cross-legged on the kitchen chair she had pulled out for herself, hands wrapped around her cup, looking at Debbie with a directness that made Debbie want to button her cardigan and she already had it buttoned to the throat.
"So," Stacy said. "Anna said. Boudoir."
"I didn't say anything," said Anna.
"You said enough." Stacy sipped her coffee. "I've done four. Three with Marguerite, one with a guy in the city who was terrible, so it doesn't count." She set the cup down. "Marguerite's the one on your card. She's the real thing. She does campaigns for a lingerie house and then she does women like us on the side, out of the same studio. She knows what she's doing."
Debbie turned her cup a quarter turn on the saucer. "Bob gave it to me. For the anniversary. He's already paid."
"And?"
"And I'm not doing it."
Anna leaned back in her chair, arms folded, saying nothing, which was its own kind of pressure. Stacy looked at Debbie the way she had looked at her at the door, direct and unembarrassed, and Debbie had the sudden strange feeling of being seen all the way down and not, somehow, found wanting for it.
"Can I tell you what it's actually like?" Stacy said. "Not the version you've got in your head."
"There isn't a version in my head."
"There is. It's the version where you stand there in front of a stranger with your arms over yourself and your face doing that thing it's doing right now, and she points a camera at you and you find out you're ugly and cold and foolish and then you drive home."
Debbie said nothing. It had been, more or less, exactly that.
"That's not what happens." Stacy pushed her cup aside and leaned in. "They do your hair and make up. You will look fantastic. The first ten minutes, yes, maybe that is uncomfortable. Then she starts moving you around, and there's a heater going, and a robe, and she tells you what to do with your hands, and she's not looking at you the way a man looks at you, she's looking at light. It's her job to look at light. And around minute twenty you forget to be embarrassed because there's nothing to be embarrassed about. It's a room and a camera and a woman telling you to turn your chin left." She shrugged. "You come out of it feeling like your own."
"My own what," said Debbie.
"Your own self. Whole. Not borrowed." Stacy smiled, and it was not unkind. "I cried in the car after. Twice. Good crying."
Anna said, quietly, "Deb. He's already paid. And he'll never ask again if you say no now. You know he won't."
That landed. Debbie looked at her hands. She thought of Bob at the sink, rinsing, rinsing, his back to her, and of ten years of all right.
"I'd be terrified," she said.
"Everyone is." Stacy reached into her purse, which was enormous and cluttered, and came out with a small amber bottle, the kind you get from a compounding pharmacy, and shook two pale capsules into her palm. She held them out.
"What is that."
"Nothing that'll hurt you. It's a relaxant. Half a thing, honestly. Women take it for flying." Stacy put the two capsules on the table between them, next to the sugar bowl, where they sat like a pair of small pale eyes. "You take one about an hour before. Maybe both if you're really wound up, but one's usually enough to take the edge off. It just makes you soft. It makes it easier to be looked at."
"I don't take pills."
"You take what the doctor gives you for your back."
"That's different."
"It's not. It's the same principle. It's a thing that helps you do a thing you've decided to do." Stacy leaned back, letting her put the choice down on the table and walk around it. "One thing. And don't drink. That's the only rule that matters. One glass of wine and you'll be buzzing, two and you'll be off the planet. So water."
Anna picked one of the capsules up and turned it between her fingers as though inspecting a coin, then set it back down. "I've taken one of those," she said. "At my sister's wedding. I was fine. I danced. A lot."
"You dance anyway," said Debbie.
"I danced badly. Sober. This helped. That was a great night. After the wedding let me tell you, I left bruises." She giggled, looking thru Debbie with horny eyes.
The kitchen clock ticked. Somewhere down the street a dog barked twice and gave up. Debbie looked at the capsules and then at the drawer where the envelope lived and then at the window, where her own reflection floated over the yard, pale and ordinary, a woman who buttoned to the throat.
"When," she said, and heard her own voice come out strange.
Stacy sat up. "What's your Thursday look like?"
"Bob's on days all week."
"Then you call Marguerite. Her studio's on Fuller, above the flower shop. She does Thursdays." Stacy was already pulling her phone out, thumb moving. "I'll text you her number so you don't have to dig out the card. And Debbie." She looked up. "Don't tell him."
"Why not?"
"Because it's a surprise." Stacy's eyes were bright and certain. "Because the whole thing lands twice as hard as a surprise. He gave you a card and a date, fine, but if you walk out of that studio and he doesn't even know you went, and then he gets the proofs and you get to watch his face when he opens them, that's the gift. That's the real one. That's the one he'll remember."
Anna nodded slowly, the way she did when she had already decided and was waiting for everyone else to catch up. "He'd worry if he knew. He'd call you, he'd drive you, he'd be waiting in the lot. You'd spend the whole time thinking about him waiting in the lot."
"Exactly," said Stacy. "This is yours. Keep it yours until it's his."
Debbie looked at the two pale capsules. Then she took one and put it in the pocket of her cardigan. Then, because Stacy was watching her and because Anna was watching her and because into the silence came the ordinary sound of the refrigerator humming, she took the other one too.
Stacy's smile went wide and real. "Good girl."
They stayed another hour. They talked about the studio, the flower shop below it, what to wear and what not to wear. The no underwear surprised Debbie. It wouldn’t really matter as she knew she would never be naked. Stacy told her a story about the guy in the city who had been terrible, and Anna laughed in the way she only laughed at Stacy, and by the time they carried their cups to the sink Debbie had said the date and the time out loud twice and it had begun to sound like something that was going to happen rather than something she was agreeing to.
At the door Stacy stopped, one hand on the frame, and said one more time, quite seriously, "Make sure you enjoy this. It will end up being more for you than Bob. I mean it."
"I know."
They went down the walk with their arms linked, the two of them, and Debbie stood in the doorway and watched them go, and the capsules were in her pocket, and the card with the address on Fuller was in the drawer, and Thursday was four days off.
Thursday came the way all her Thursdays came, with her mother's appointment in the morning and a list on the counter, and Debbie did the list first because doing the list meant not thinking. She dropped her mother back at the house at noon and sat in the car in the driveway with her hands on the wheel and the engine off, and then she went home and showered and did her hair the way she did it for weddings, and put on the dress Stacy had approved, the dark green one that buttoned down the front, and stood in the kitchen with the cardigan over her arm.
At one she took the first capsule with a glass of water, and at half past one she took the second, because her hands would not stop shaking and the hour was coming whether she was ready or not.
The drive took longer than it should have. She came up Fuller twice, past the flower shop with its buckets out on the sidewalk, and parked at the meter and sat a moment, and the world had gone soft at the edges in a way that was not unpleasant, a little like the first glass of wine but without the heat. She looked at the flower shop window and thought about turning the car around. Then she got out, because turning around had already been decided against, and went up the side stairs to the door with the small brass plate that said Marguerite.
The woman who opened it was Forty-something, short, in black, with auburn hair loose and sun glasses pushed into it, and she looked at Debbie for a second and said, "You're the anniversary one."
"The anniversary one."
"Stacy's friend. She called me, explained." Marguerite stood aside. "Come in. Shoes off. There's tea if you want it, but I'd skip it, you'll be holding your stomach in."
The studio was one long room with high windows and white walls, a backdrop stand, a radiator, a velvet settee, and a heater going in the corner already, ticking. It smelled like a hair salon and warm dust. A rack of garments hung against the far wall, all of them small.
Marguerite put her in a chair and did her face, talking the whole while about nothing, about the flower shop downstairs and the landlord and a wedding she had shot on Saturday where the mother of the bride had cried through the cake, and Debbie sat with her eyes closed and let the voice go over her and felt the capsules holding her up like water. Then the hair. Then a robe, dark blue, heavy, and a chair by the heater, and Marguerite stood back with her arms folded and looked at her for a long moment.
"All right," she said. "We'll start slow. You can keep the robe on for the first ones. When you're ready, you tell me."
The first pictures were of her hands. Then her face turned to the window. Then standing against the white wall with the robe closed and her arms loose, and Marguerite moved around her with the camera clicking and said nothing about how she looked, only where to put her eyes, her chin, one shoulder. Turn your chin left. Look at the window. Look at me. Breathe out.
Debbie struggled with the direction. Conscious of her body. What she wasn’t wearing under the robe. Marguerite‘s assistant Tom, came thru the door holding a phone. “Nathan, he needs some photos urgently for a brief.” Marguerite Apologies and leaves the room. Tom looks at Debbie, he is studying her like he is looking at a painting. Evaluating and looking at all the aspects.
“Make sure you breathe deeply, slow and deep. It helps you relax. So does wine.” Tom said as he looked at Debbie.
“I shouldn’t have wine, maybe a tea.” Debbie replied trying the breathing. Tom turned and opened a fridge, took out a bottle of white wine and poured a large glass. He looked at Debbie and he filled the glass to the top.
He brought the glass and handed it to Debbie. He stood waiting for the glass back. Debbie felt too embarrassed to say no and she drank the wine and handed him back the glass.
Marguerite came back in and grabbed the camera. She directed Debbie back under the lights started to pose her again.
Debbie breathed out, and the click went on, and at some point she noticed that she had stopped thinking about her body. It had been, at the start, a thing she was standing inside and apologizing for; now it was just something Marguerite was pointing a light at. The heater ticked. Somewhere below, water ran in the flower shop and stopped.
"Good," said Marguerite. "Now the robe. All the way off, leave it behind you on the settee."
And Debbie did it. That was the thing she would think about later, on the drive home: that she did it without a pause, without even a hand hovering, because the room had made it ordinary. She stood in the light in nothing but the black slip she had brought and the little sunglasses-sized thing Stacy had told her counted as underwear, and Marguerite did not look at her like a man. She looked like a woman fixing a hem.
They did the settee. They did the window, her forehead against the glass, her back to the camera, and Marguerite said, my God, the light, and shot fast. They did the floor by the heater, knees to one side, arms up in her hair, and Debbie laughed once, out loud, at nothing, at the whole absurdity of it, and Marguerite caught that too and said, keep that, that was the best one all day.
"Good," she said. "You're warm now. Let's push."
"Push."
"Bolder." Marguerite came and adjusted the slip, a strap off the shoulder, then the other. "You've got a lovely back and you don't know it. Everyone's shy about the same three things and they're the three things that hold the frame. I want you on the bed, on your stomach, chin up. Then we'll do the chair backwards."
Debbie looked at the bed, which was an iron frame with white sheets and a bare bulb on a stand beside it, and it was not the settee, and something in her chest did a small fold.
"Is that."
"It's a bed in a studio," Marguerite said. "It isn't a bed, it's a prop.. Now get on it, we're losing the window."
She got on it.
The sheets were cold and then not. Marguerite stood on a stool and shot down at her, and Debbie lay on her stomach with her chin up and her heels in the air and one strap gone, and the light came through the window and lay along her back like a hand. Then on her side, hip up, elbow down, the slip pulled to show the shoulder, then further, the whole back bare to the waist, her face turned away.
"Further," said Marguerite. "Take the slip off. Keep the arm across. Not that arm, the other one, yes. Chin down. Eyes closed. Open. Closed. Good."
And Debbie heard herself say, from somewhere behind her own teeth, "Is this what everyone does?"
"No," said Marguerite. "Most of them stop at the settee." The camera clicked. "You're not most of them. Knee up. Higher. Higher. There. Hold it, hold it, don't breathe, now breathe."
She shot for twenty more minutes like that. Debbie on the floor with her back arched against the wall, the slip gone entirely and one arm the only thing between her and the lens, and it was not shame she was feeling, it was something closer to pride, the deep odd pleasure of being the one who had decided. She turned her chin left. She turned her chin right. She put her hands in her hair the way she was told. At some point Marguerite said, quietly, almost to herself, "He's going to lose his mind," and Debbie laughed again, a low laugh she did not entirely recognize, and the camera caught that too.
Then they stopped. Marguerite handed her the robe and she stood in the middle of the studio with it wrapped around her and her hair loose and the heater ticking, and she felt, for the first time in a great many years, like a woman in a room rather than a woman in a coat.
"Water," said Marguerite, and gave her a glass. "Sit. Don't look at the back of the camera, that's not for you yet. I'll have proofs in a week."
"A week."
"Maybe five days." Marguerite looked at her over the top of the glass. "Do you want the truth about the last hour?"
Debbie drank. "All right."
"You were afraid of the wrong thing," said Marguerite. "At the door you were afraid I'd see you. That's not the thing they're ever afraid of, in the end." She capped the lens. "It's that they'll like it.”
Debbie held the glass and did not answer, because there was no answer that did not sound like something, and Marguerite did not seem to need one. She set the lens down and went to the little desk by the window and came back with a tablet, thumbing it awake.
"You have somewhere to be?" she said.
"Not especially."
"Then sit another twenty minutes and listen to me, because this is the part where I sell you something." Marguerite turned the tablet so Debbie could see. On it was a woman against a slate wall, hair wet, one hand at her throat, wearing a slip that was almost nothing. It was beautiful in a way that made Debbie's stomach pull in, the light falling into the hollow of the collarbone like she had never seen a woman configured that way before. "This is a campaign. Lingerie house, spring, and the client's man is coming Thursday to look at proofs, and the model I booked broke her wrist falling off a bicycle in Rock Creek Park, which I did not believe until she sent me the X-ray."
"You want me."
"I want your back and your shoulders and the way you hold your chin when you don't know you're doing anything. Which I couldn't have got from her anyway." Marguerite put the tablet down. "Same studio. Same light. Only he sees them, and depending where we finish, if he likes them there's a second day, paid, proper money, not the friend-of-Stacy rate."
Debbie looked at the water in her glass. The capsules had settled into her like a warm bath and the wine sat on top of them and she could feel the edges of the room disappearing, the heater ticking, the flower shop running its water below.
"I don't know anything about doing that."
"You don't have to. That's the whole job. You stand where I put you and you do what I say, and the picture does the rest." Marguerite looked at her a long moment, blunt and calm. "And before you ask, it isn't really anything you haven't already done this afternoon. A slip, a corner of the wall, your own face. The client pays for a feeling, not an anatomy lesson."
From the doorway, Tom said, "She's right about that. I've shot with her eleven years. She doesn't do cheap."
Debbie had nearly forgotten he was there. He had stood with his back to the wall through the last hour of it, quiet, holding the phone, and now he came and leaned in the frame of the door with his arms crossed and looked at her the way he had before, all over, unhurried, the way you look at a piece of furniture you are thinking about buying.
"I'm not sure, my husband, what would he think?" Debbie said.
"You're perfect for it," said Tom. "If your husband got this as a gift he will love this."
Marguerite waited. She had a way of waiting that was not pressure so much as a door left standing open, and Debbie sat in the middle of it with the robe loose at the throat and her hair drying against her neck and thought, distantly, that the wine was making this decision and that she had told Stacy she would not drink. Then she thought about the drawer at home, and the card in it, and Bob's square handwriting, and the fact that she had come here to be looked at and had instead been made into a picture that existed outside of her, and that somewhere in the last two hours the shy thing in her had gone quiet and lain down. All her fear taken away, by the pills and the wine.
"All right," she said. It came out of her almost indifferently, the way she might have agreed to a coffee. "What do I wear."
Marguerite's mouth moved, just a corner of it. "Nothing you brought. Tom, the ivory."
Tom went to the rack against the wall and came back with a bundle of silk the colour of the inside of a shell, and a pair of stockings in a paper sleeve, and a belt of thin gold chain. He laid them over the back of the settee without a word and then stood there with his hands in his pockets, watching Debbie again, and this time she looked back at him while she did it, which surprised her, and which she did not stop.
"Tea first," said Marguerite. "You'll want it in an hour."
They let her alone to change. The slip was looser than the one she had brought, cut low at the back and low at the front, and the stockings had a seam up the back of them and she had to sit on the settee to get them right, and by the time she stood up in front of the mirror by the desk she did not look like Debbie from the kitchen in the dark green dress. She looked like a picture of a woman. That was the only way she could put it to herself. The bold, sexy woman looking back at her had confidence. She was bold, strong and sexual.
When she came back into the light, Marguerite had raised the radiator and drawn the black backdrop halfway across and set a low stool in front of it. The window had gone from gold to grey. Tom had moved the tall lamp around and pushed the bed against the far wall and turned on the little fan that moved the backdrop's lower edge a half inch at a time.
"Stool first," Marguerite said. "Legs to the side, the near one long. Chin down. Rest your hand here." She came and put Debbie's hand on her own thigh, high, near the seam. "Yes. Look at Tom."
Debbie looked at Tom. He was behind Marguerite with his arms folded, and his face did nothing, and the camera clicked and clicked, and the fan pushed the black cloth and the lamp poured down, and she sat there being looked at by two people for whom it was entirely a job, and it was the least lonely half hour she could remember in years.
They moved to the floor. Marguerite had her on her back along the hem of the backdrop with her arms overhead and the chain belt lying loose across the silk, and then on her stomach with the low back exposed to the waist and her face turned, and Marguerite said, don't smile, don't smile, don't, and Debbie did not, and the camera ate it up.
Then Marguerite knelt beside her and said, without any particular weight, "Take the slip off and hold it."
Debbie lay there with her cheek on the floorboards and the boards warm from the heater, and she thought about it for a long second, long enough that the room had a chance to see her think.
Debbie turned slightly as she removed the slip. aware of two sets of eyes watching her getting undressed. The shyness was there but it didn't stop her anymore. She knew Tom would see the side of her breast, maybe even a nipple as she lifted the slip over her head. She didn't rush. Her heart beating faster, her breath shorter, the tingling in her sex back. She turned, her arm across her breasts, her chin up, deep, slow breaths. Her eyes finding Tom's eyes. His expression was calm, this is something he had seen many times before.
"Across the front," said Marguerite. "Nothing I can't already see. Higher on the hip, like so." She arranged it with two fingers, businesslike, and stepped back. "There. Turn your chin left."
Debbie turned her chin left. Tom had come around to stand where she could see him, and he was looking at her, plain, and she felt it land somewhere low and steady and she did not look away from it, and Marguerite shot across the whole length of the floor like she was catching something that would not hold still twice.
"That's the frame," she said at last, and lifted the lens. "We're done. He'll take these."
Debbie stayed where she was another moment, breathing, the boards warm under her, the silk a heap at her hip, and did not get up until Marguerite reached down a hand and helped her to her feet.
Marguerite steadied her with a hand at the elbow until she had her feet under her, then let go and went to the desk and turned on a second lamp, a long one on a stand, which threw a column of pale light against the black cloth and made the dust in the room suddenly visible, turning slowly.
"Sit," she said. "Robe, water, breathe. You did good work."
Debbie sat on the settee with the robe around her shoulders but not closed, the ivory slip pooled across her lap where she had gathered it, and watched the two of them move. They worked without talking much. Tom took the stool out of the light and set it against the wall, then lifted the backdrop stand and shifted it a foot closer to the window, and Marguerite dragged the low bed out from the corner and pulled the sheets straight and tucked them under the iron frame with the flat of her hand, quick, the way you make a bed for a guest who is already at the door. The heater ticked. The fan turned the lower edge of the cloth a half inch at a time.
"Change the bulb in the left head," Marguerite said. "It's going yellow."
Tom went to the case by the radiator and did it, thumbing out the old bulb and holding it up to the window, squinting, then fitting the new one. The light over the bed went from gold to a cool white and the whole room changed shape with it, sharper, more like a room in the morning.
"That's better," said Marguerite. She looked at the set, and then at the floor, and then at the window, and did a thing with her hands that was not quite a shrug. "I've got the long lens in the car, the one I use for the portrait work. It's in the trunk and I'm carrying it up two flights. Ten minutes."
"Take the truck keys," said Tom. "Mine's blocking you in."
She caught them off the desk and was gone, and the door clicked, and the studio got very quiet. Just the heater and the fan and, below, the flower shop running a hose into a bucket, the sound of it coming up through the boards.
Debbie sat with her hands in her lap. The robe had slipped off one shoulder and she did not pull it up.
Tom came over and stood in front of the settee. He looked at her for a moment with his hands in his pockets and his head a little to the side, the same slow inventory of a look he had given her before, and she found she did not mind it now. That was new. She noticed it the way you notice the temperature of a room. She did not mind it at all.
"How are you feeling?" he said.
"Warm."
"That's the wine." He turned and went to the little fridge under the desk, opened it, and took out the bottle, which was down to its last third and beaded with cold. He poured into the same glass she had used before, not quite full, and came back with it. "You want it?"
She thought about Stacy's rule, the one that mattered. She thought about it the way she had thought about the card in the drawer, from a distance, as a thing that belonged to another version of the evening. Her hands were loose. The room was soft. The wine would be cold going down and would put something steady under the whole of it, and one more glass of anything could not possibly change a night that had already been decided.
"It can't hurt," she said, and took it.
He watched her drink. She drank half of it standing there, which was more than she had meant to, and the cold of it went through her chest, and then the warmth came up behind it and spread, slow, along her arms. She sat back down on the settee, closer to the middle this time, and she finished the wine before Tom took the glass from her when she held it out, and set it on the desk, and did not go back to his wall. He stood by the lamp with his shoulder against the backdrop stand, quiet, and the two of them waited for Marguerite the way people wait at a bus stop, without needing to fill it.
The wine kept working while they waited. It was different from the capsules. The capsules had held her up; the wine took the last of the tension out of the joints of her, and by the time she heard the stairs creak she had stopped arranging the robe and had let it fall where it wanted, and she was looking at the black cloth and the white sheets and the new cold bulb, and it did not frighten her. It looked like a place she had already been.
Marguerite came in backwards, hauling a long case, and Tom took it off her and set it on the desk and opened it. She looked at Debbie once, quick, and then again, longer, and something moved in her face that was not surprise.
"All right," she said. "I want to talk to you before we go on."
"Go on."
"Different session to this last one." Marguerite closed the door behind her and leaned on it. "The client I told you about, the lingerie house. He's coming Thursday and I've got nothing, because my girl's got a wrist like a bag of gravel. I want to shoot that campaign here. Tonight. Same room, same light, you in the clothes. You are a natural, not the look the Client asked for but I am sure he will be pleased."
Debbie heard the words and turned them over without any particular hurry. She knew she should be asking something.
"It's a real stretch," Marguerite said. "I'm not going to pretend it isn't. The ivory was soft. This one's the campaign and it goes further, that's the whole point of it, that's what they pay for. Bolder cuts, more of you, a couple I'd tell your husband about only if you asked me to." She held up a hand before Debbie could answer. "But this is how I work it. We go until we've got the main shots, four, five of them, the ones he's actually buying. Once those are in the can, you say stop and we stop, and everything after that is yours. Nobody makes you finish it. Nobody's going to be disappointed in you either way."
"That's fair," said Tom, from the desk.
"It's fair," Marguerite agreed, and waited.
Debbie sat on the settee in the robe with the wine warm in her chest and the room going soft at every edge, the lamp and the cloth and the two of them standing there looking at her, and she could feel the whole thing as a room she could walk into or a door she could shut. She was aware, in some far-off way, in a small clear voice somewhere behind everything, that the careful woman with the list on the counter and the cardigan buttoned to the throat would not have answered the same way. But that woman was home, and the glass on the desk was three-quarters gone, and the answer came up out of her easily, without any weight to it at all, the way a yes comes when there is nothing left in you that knows how to say no.
"All right," she said. "What do you want me in."
Marguerite let her breath out and turned to the desk, "I need you to sign a release, otherwise I can't use any of the shots." Marguerite, put a pen on the desk next to the release. "Read it and sign it if you are happy with it. It is a standard release form, nothing tricky, I have the rights on the photos to use them or sell them." Marguerite went to the rack.
Debbie moved over to the desk and picked up the Release. It was three pages, there were lots of paragraphs, each numbered, responsibility, authority, disclosure, right to this, right to that. Debbie stared and turned the pages, not really comprehending all of it. Her brain trying to decipher the words and the meaning. Her hand grabbed the pen and she signed. She felt safe with Marguerite and this was just part of the process.
Marguerite worked the rack the way she did everything else, without ceremony. Wire hangers slid along the bar and came off one after another, and she held each piece up against the light long enough to make a judgment and then either hung it back or laid it across the arm of the settee.
"This one's the opening," she said, and laid down something black, flat, and matte. From where Debbie sat it looked like three separate pieces of nothing. "Gown, open down the front, no back. Then the slate group, that's the one you saw on the tablet. Then the straps." She glanced over. "You're going to hate the straps for about four minutes."
"Straps."
"You'll see."
She laid out four more in a row along the settee and stepped back from them, arms crossed, considering the whole arrangement the way she had considered Debbie's face in the chair an hour ago. Then she rearranged two of them, switching their places, and nodded to herself and went to the case Tom had opened on the desk.
Debbie looked at the row of it. The ivory slip was still pooled in her lap, soft as a napkin, and it had seemed like a great deal when she put it on. Now it looked like something a girl would wear to bed in a house full of relatives. The black gown she could not immediately assemble in her mind into a garment. The straps were not a garment at all. They were hardware, thin and matte, and there was a length of it that looked long enough to cross the room.
"That's a lot of nothing," she said, and her own voice surprised her, low and loose, with the wine moving under it.
Marguerite looked up from the case. "It's a lingerie campaign," she said. "They sell the nothing. That's the entire product." She took a lens out and fitted it to the body with her ear cocked toward it, listening to it seat, and set it down. "You'll be covered where it counts. The rest is a suggestion and you'll learn in ten minutes that a suggestion photographs better than a fact. Tom, the fan on the right, low."
Tom moved the fan and turned the back drop's edge.
"You change in the corner," Marguerite said, gesturing at a folding screen that stood against the wall by the garments rack. "Take the black gown first, and the fishnet stockings. Leave the jewellery, we're doing metal on the skin later, not now. And Debbie." She had gone back to the case and was threading something out of it, a long silver clip on a cord. "When you come out, come out walking. Don't stand in the corner waiting for me to call you. Walk to the light Chin up, bold without prancing."
Debbie stood up. The robe slid off her shoulders and she caught it at the waist without thinking about it, and then thought about it, and let it go, and walked to the screen with it balled under her arm and the black gown over the other. Behind her she heard Marguerite say something low to Tom and Tom answer it lower. She did not try to hear it. The screen was three panels of canvas on a wooden hinge, and behind it she could still see the light moving on the floorboards underneath, the two of them crossing and recrossing, setting something.
The black dress proved more challenging to don than its appearance suggested. It was a single, sheer garment that barely registered in her palms. Fastened down the front with small, hidden hooks, her bust larger than the intended model, the entire back remained completely exposed from her neck to just below to start of her buttocks. Once the last of the tricky hidden hooks was secured, she glanced down and saw her nipples and trimmed pubic hair visible as faint shadows through the fabric. Her stomach lurched briefly before calming. The stockings remained in place, their seams running perfectly straight up the backs of her legs. She wore nothing beneath the dress, as nothing was given to her to wear under it, and there had never been any doubt that this was the intended effect.
She stood a moment with her hand flat on the canvas, breathing the way Tom had told her to, slow and deep. The wine had gone through her whole body by now and it made everything a half step easier, as though the floor were slightly water. She looked down at the seam of the stocking and the line of the sheer black over her hip and she thought, without any particular heat, that Bob had never seen her like this. Nobody had. That was not a frightening thought anymore. It was a fact she was holding, like a coin.
She came out from behind the screen and walked.
She did not hurry and she did not look at the floor. The long grey light from the window was going and the lamp had taken over, and she crossed the boards into it the way Marguerite had told her to, and the room received her without comment. Tom was at the desk with his back half turned and he looked up and then he was not at the desk anymore in any way that mattered, he was just looking. Marguerite was standing by the stool with the silver clip in her hand and she watched Debbie come the whole way and did not move to meet her.
"Stop there," she said, when Debbie reached the middle of the light. "Turn. Slow."
Debbie turned. She turned because she had decided to make this night her own, because the wine had put a floor under her that did not move, and because standing in the middle of a beam of light in clothing that was a suggestion, with two professionals watching her cross a room, was, she found, not shameful at all. It felt like the exact centre of something.
"Mm," said Marguerite. "The gown's too long on you, you're shorter than the sample girl. Tom."
Tom approached with the clips in one hand and high heels in the other. He lowered himself to one knee and delicately pinched the hem of the translucent dress, gathering it three inches along her thigh before securing it with a clip. His fingers brushed against the inside of her ankle, paused momentarily, Debbie without thinking moved her legs apart, then he repeated the process on the opposite side. The breath caught in Debbie's throat. His proximity was undeniable, his scent of coffee and cologne enveloping her. He kept his gaze fixed solely on the fabric, avoiding any eye contact, which somehow made the situation more intimate than direct eye contact would have. A shiver coursed through her as he knelt so near her exposed body beneath the nearly transparent gown.
He encircled one ankle, lifting gently and guided the shoe onto her foot, his palm moving upward along her lower leg. While fastening the clasp, he held her leg positioned against his body. Debbie's eyes widened as she became aware of his proximity to her most private parts, her sudden intake of breath breaking the silence. She noticed the hint of a smile forming on his mouth. He returned that foot to the ground and lifted the other, repeating the same intimate ritual. Debbie's body reacted with both nervous butterflies and a thrilling tingle to his closeness, making her hyper-aware of every movement and every sensation. He returned her foot to the floor and stood back, their eyes making contact, his gaze steady and intense. The smile remained on his lips, his face gentle and reassuring, as he gave a slight nod before turning and moving back.
"Again," said Marguerite. "Turn."
She turned. The lamp caught the sheer black and threw the shape of her onto the wall, thin and long and moving, and Marguerite watched the wall instead of the woman and said, "There. That's the walk."
"Now the straps," Tom said, standing.
"Now the straps," Marguerite agreed, and reached past Debbie to the row on the settee, and lifted the length of matte black from the others, and held it up between two hands so it hung between them like a leash. "Come here. This is the part where you may hate me."
Debbie looked at the straps and then at the mirror on the far wall, where a stranger stood in a semi sheer black gown in a pool of light, and did not, when she turned toward the strap, look away.
The strap was not what she had imagined. It was a length of matte grey webbing, an inch wide, and Marguerite came around behind her with the end of it in one hand and laid the flat of it around Debbie's neck, then down under her breasts and sitting under her ribcage, then around the back of her waist, talking the whole time to Tom rather than to her.
"Tension, not tight. If it bites, we lose the line." A clip snapped at her shoulder. "Other arm up. Elbow bent, hand behind your head. Yes. Now the second one."
Debbie stood with her arm raised and her wrist behind her neck while Marguerite threaded the second strap down across the front of the gown, over the sheer black, and clipped it at her. The webbing crossed the whole front of her and made a long straight line where there had only been shadow, and she felt it the way you feel a hand, a light pressure that reminded her at every breath where she ended.
"Walk it out," Marguerite said, stepping back. "From the cloth to the lamp. Slow. Stop when the light's on your face."
Moving deliberately across the floor, Debbie felt the straps adjust to her body's rhythm as the sheer dress moving with each step. The fan created a subtle movement in the black fabric's borders. The strap encircling her neck functioned as a submissive restraint, marking her compliance, her submission to the process complete. Marguerite had positioned her camera to hang from its strap, but she perceived her attention unwavering, not captured by the lens, which was both more violating and strangely freeing—she could no longer separate these conflicting emotions.
"Stop," said Marguerite. "Chin down. Hands here. Kneel."
She knelt on the floorboards by the low bed, one knee down and the other up, and Marguerite came in and moved her hands, her chin, the fall of her hair, and each time she touched her it was quick and correct and left no mark that a person could take offense at. Then she stood back and said, "Hold that."
The camera clicked for a while. Somewhere in the middle of it Debbie realized she had stopped arranging herself, stopped doing the small constant arithmetic of a woman in a room, and had become simply a shape being lit. It was restful in a way she could not have explained to anyone at home.
"Let's move on from this pose," Marguerite said finally. "I have the three shots we need. Now set up the mirror." Debbie continued kneeling, her eyes drawn downward where her most intimate area was just visible through the transparent dress. Her mind couldn't make sense of the situation she was in; it was simply the way things were at that moment.
"The mirror."
"The tall one. Tom, bring it round."
Tom carried the long standing mirror from the wall by the garments rack and set it on the floor in front of the backdrop, angled, so that the glass caught the lamp and threw the light back onto her at a slant. Debbie saw herself come into it from the side and then settle, and did not look, at first. She kept her eyes on Marguerite, because that was the rule of the room: you looked where you were told.
Marguerite saw it and did not let her off.
"At the mirror," she said. "That's the shot. Look at yourself."
Debbie looked.
She had been looking at her reflection all her life, in bathroom mirrors and car windows and the dark glass of the oven door, and it had always been the same woman, and the woman had always been a list of things that needed forgiving: the softness under the arms, the pale line where the wedding ring sat, the way her face went a little down at the corners when she was tired. She had spent ten years dressing that woman to the throat. She had spent the whole afternoon half turned away from her, and had assumed the camera would do the same, would take the pieces and arrange them into something better than the whole.
It had not. The camera had not, and the mirror did not, and standing in the pool of the lamp with the sheer black and the long grey strap crossing her, with the seam of the stockings straight as a plumb line and her hair loose against her bare back and her chin still holding the angle Marguerite had put it in, Debbie saw the woman in the glass all the way through, and the woman was not a list.
The woman was a body that stood up. Shoulders that carried things; she had never once thought of them as lovely, only as practical, and they were lovely, there was a fall of light along the near one that went down into the curve of the arm like water going downhill. The waist the gown had been clipped to show was not a waist she had earned at a gym; it was hers, it had borne the children, it had bent over the sink and the garden and the beds of two houses and it held its curve anyway. Her thighs, which she had apologised for in every dressing room since she was nineteen, were strong enough to kneel on the boards for as long as Marguerite wanted and not shake. Her face was not the girl's face anymore. It had everything in it. It was, she thought, with a strange flat clarity, the face of somebody you would want to look at.
And the bold woman who looked back at her, the one with the strap around her neck and her own eyes steady above it, was not a stranger she had been dressed up as for an hour. It was her. That was the part that went through her like cold water. It had been her the whole time, and she had spent a decade carrying it around under a cardigan, buttoned to the throat, telling it to be smaller.
She heard the shutter go twice and did not care.
"Don't move," Marguerite said, very quietly.
"I'm not moving."
"Good. Look at the shoulder. Left hand, up, take the strap and hold it, don't pull it, just hold it. There. Now look back at the mirror."
She looked back at the mirror and watched her own hand come up and take the strap, and the two of them, the woman in the glass and the woman doing it, were the same movement, one thing, and she understood with a warmth that went all the way to her fingertips what Stacy had meant in the kitchen on Tuesday, the thing about coming out of it feeling like your own.
Your own self. Whole. Not borrowed.
"Beautiful," said Marguerite, to the camera. "Tom, fill in from the left, she's going dark on that side."
Tom brought the reflector and knelt down with it, close, six inches from her knee, and tipped the light up the length of her. She could see him in the mirror as well, at the bottom edge of it, on the floor with his arms up and the white board in his hands, and she could see that he was not looking at the mirror. He was looking at the real one, which was her, the actual her, and the look was not the look of a man evaluating a thing to buy. It was something quieter and more careful than that, and it did not make her want to cover herself. It made her want to keep standing exactly where she was.
"Hold," said Marguerite, and the shutter, and the shutter, and the shutter.
The wine was all through her now, and the capsule under it, and the heater ticking, and the flower shop had gone quiet below, and Debbie stood in the middle of the light in a gown like a suggestion and a strap like a line of ink and watched the woman she was going to be for the rest of her life look back at her without flinching, and she thought, with a small fierce calm, that she was not finished yet. Not nearly.
"All right," said Marguerite, and lowered the camera. "That's the campaign. Come and sit down, I want to talk to you about the rest of it."
She sat where she had been standing for so long, on the low bed with the sheets still straight under her, and Marguerite pulled the stool around and sat down across from her with her elbows on her knees. She brought the camera and brought up the photos of the shoot. She picked one and it filled the LCD screen on the back of the camera. Debbie looked at the small picture, A beautiful, sexy woman was in the photo, confident. She kept staring at it as more details of the photos registered. The first was the confident woman, then the outfit, more sheer in the photos than she could see when she looked at herself in the mirror. The flash and lighting clearly showing her nipples, the trimmed pubic hair, the lips of her pussy when she knelt.
Staring at this other woman on the LCD, her consciousness still unable to merge them into one entity. In the reflection they had become unified, yet examining these photographs that revealed everything, making them two distinct individuals again. The subject in the photograph seemed like an entirely different person to her former self. Part of her was still the woman in the buttoned up cardigan, but that was disappearing to become the woman on the screen.
"Two things and then we go again," Marguerite said. Debbie snapped out of the introspection, her mind listening to the sound and the words coming out of Marguerite's mouth. "First. The campaign I just shot is the safe one. It sells. It's what the client expects. Second." She looked at Debbie the way she had looked at her across the tablet an hour ago, blunt and calm. "He pays more for the other thing. The one that goes further. Every house does, it's the whole catalogue these days. I've got nothing for it and I told him I would. I want you to finish this with me."
"Further," Debbie heard the voice, the question in the answer sounded apprehensive, but the voice was clear and strong, questioning what was going to be required. Even though she could no longer make decisions. Every query was just a formality, she would follow any instruction or direction.
"You've done the shoulders and the back and the mirror. This one's the front of you, and it's cut like the straps, and there's no version of it where you're guessing what you're looking at." Marguerite waited a beat. "Same rules. Main shots in the can, then you say stop and we stop. Nobody holds you to continue."
Debbie sat with the strap still around her neck and the glass of wine warm somewhere low in her, and the room had the long soft rock to it, with the soft edges that she had stopped mistrusting. The woman in the mirror had not gone anywhere. She was still there in the corner of it, at the edge of the light, waiting to see what she would do.
"All right," she said.
Marguerite stood and went to the desk. "Tom. The Paris set. Bottom case, second drawer down."
Tom set the reflector on its stand and went. He brought back a flat box wrapped in tissue and set it on the settee, and folded the tissue away. What came out of it was two pieces and a fine chain, and the two pieces were small enough to lie together in one hand, and Debbie looked at them and understood immediately that the term garment was generous.
Chapter excerpt truncated at the edge.