George continued to look at me. Drops of sweat had formed above his mouth and at his temples. He looked weary but pleased with himself, like a person who has just eaten well, and as I studied his face, with its high forehead and brows that almost touched each other, I recoiled from him. The intense pleasure I had felt only seconds before was gone. I watched as he ran his tongue over his upper lip. It was an idle motion, but for some reason it struck me as horrible, and I closed my eyes. What has happened? I thought. I didn’t say anything to George, but he must have sensed the change. I walked over to the window and looked into the street. A man with a package in his arms was hurrying down the block. My hands shook. I turned, saw my shoes and socks on the floor, and bent down to put them on.
George stood over me while I buckled my second shoe. “Are you okay?” he said.
“I’m tired,” I lied. “That’s all.” When I looked at him, I noticed his eyes had lost their sharpness.
“I hope something will come of it,” he said.
I looked at the door. “Of what?”
“The pictures, Iris. Are you still here?”
“Sorry,” I said.
“Sometimes I work for hours and there’s not a single good photograph. On the other hand, it happens that I catch a fabulous image with one shot. You never know.”
“It’s a matter of chance then,” I said, picking up my sweater from the sofa.
“Chance is part of it.”
“And the rest?” I moved toward the door.
“The rest,” he said in his slow, deliberate way, “is design.”
I reached for the doorknob, but George moved and blocked my exit. “I-ris.” He hung on to each syllable of my name, turning it into a call.
“What is it?” I sang back at him.
He leaned against the door and let his eyes move down my body. “You’re transparent,” he said.
I winced. “What do you want, George?” I said.
“That’s the question, isn’t it?” he said. “Maybe you should ask yourself the same thing.” He leaned close to me and kissed my cheek, but he didn’t pull away. He held his mouth to my face for several seconds and then kissed my neck.
“Let’s not kill it,” he said.
I took him by the shoulders and pushed him against the door, not hard but firmly. I could see his surprise.
“Be careful,” I said. “I bite.”
He laughed loudly and stepped aside, opening the door for me, and as I walked down the hall, I heard his laughter. “Touché,” he called after me, but I didn’t look back.
• • •
Stephen and I were to meet for dinner at Moon Palace, a Chinese restaurant at 112th Street and Broadway. He was late as usual, and I tried to read while I waited, but the book, a bone-dry treatment of heroines in nineteenth-century English novels, didn’t hold my attention. With my eyes on the page, I thought about the afternoon. Again I asked myself what had happened. Had it been an aborted seduction? I remembered his lips at my neck, his long hair in my face. “Don’t kill it,” he had said. In the past I had given myself up to ephemeral pleasures, falling into bed with near strangers, and had no regrets. But those encounters had been simple. With George, I was lost—like a person in another country who can’t read the signs. And George had taken the advantage. By claiming that I, unlike he, was intelligible—an open book—he had made me vulnerable. What he saw or didn’t see, what he knew or didn’t know, was almost superfluous. George had an appetite for ambiguity, and I sensed that he had created a cloud of doubt in me for his own enjoyment. He was titillated by the idea that he could manipulate my desire. That is what I feared. What sickened me was that I was implicated in this obscure relation. I had sought it, and my motives were muddled. George may not have been clairvoyant, but he instinctively knew how to probe the unspoken within me, and I had felt it begin to stir the moment he looked over at me, his face flushed with satisfaction. I felt a hand on my neck and jumped. Wheeling around, I saw Stephen.
I caught my breath. “This is New York, Stephen. You don’t sneak up behind people like that.”
“Sorry,” he said, and smiled. “How’s the model?”
“Why?” I said. “Did you talk to George?”
“No.” His eyes widened. “I was only asking you how it went.”
“Fine,” I said.
He sat down opposite me. “Fine? That’s all you have to say?” He leaned back in his chair and put his knuckles to his chin, examining me with another smile. “What happened?”
“Nothing. He took pictures.”
Stephen reached across the table, grabbed my wrist, and pulled me toward him. I felt a surge of desire that irritated me. No, I thought, no. I tried to twist out of his grip, but he held me firmly and muttered under his breath. “You went to bed with George, didn’t you?”
“Stephen!” He released me.
The man at the next table gave me a thin smile.
“It doesn’t matter,” he said. “You’re free to do as you please.”
I watched Stephen order the food. After the waiter left, he addressed me in a brisk voice. “You know George likes pictures better than people.”
As he spoke, I felt my throat tighten. “What do you mean?”
“Exactly what I said.” He stopped and pretended to look at something across the room. “He wanted to photograph me, too, but I said no.”
The picture of the young man’s body in the window returned to me. It wasn’t Stephen, I thought. Of course not. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Should I have?” he said. “You made your decision. I made mine. They’re completely independent of one another.”
“Bastard,” I said.
He lifted his hands in a gesture of false surprise. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
We stared at each other. Stephen’s eyes were clouded, disingenuous. Had he been negligent in not telling me he had refused to be photographed by George? It wasn’t clear. Our intimacy had no rules. There was no contract between us. I felt the frustration like a clamp in my chest and jaw. Before I knew it, I had spoken like a fool. “You’ve never loved me,” I said.
Stephen’s face lost its tension, and I remember thinking how easy it is to speak in clichés, to steal a line from pulp fiction and let it fall. We can only hover around the inexpressible with our words anyway, and there is comfort in saying what we have heard before. Stephen had a ready answer. “I’ve always loved you,” he said. “I just don’t love you in the way you want.”
• • •
Two days later, George called. “There’s only one photo I’m really happy with, but it’s extraordinary. I thought you and Stephen might come to dinner tomorrow, and I’ll show it to you. There are several others that are very pretty, but they’re not for me. They’re not . . .” He hesitated.
“Not art,” I said.
George laughed, “No,” he said. “They’re not art.”
We were silent.
“I feel bad about that day,” I said.
“You shouldn’t,” he said.
“But I do.”
“Don’t worry about it.”
“You didn’t mention it to Stephen, did you?”
“What would I have said, Iris?”
“I don’t know.”
“Is there something you want to say to me?” he asked.
The question stumped me. I didn’t answer for several seconds. “If there was,” I said finally, “I can’t think of it now.”
George laughed again. “Well, if you do, I’m always here. Are we on for tomorrow then? Eight o’clock at my apartment?”
“That’s fine,” I said.
“I’m looking forward to seeing you, Iris.” His voice was warm with affection, and I wondered what it meant.
“Goodbye, George.”
“Goodbye until tomorrow,” he said.
I listened to him hang up the phone.
Stephen and I didn’t go to George’s together. I invited him, but he told m
e he was meeting someone downtown before the dinner. He didn’t name the person and I suppressed my desire to ask, but that afternoon, as I sat in the library beginning a paper I had pompously entitled “Fictions Within Fiction: The Fate of George Eliot’s Dorothea Brooke,” I imagined Stephen’s companion was a beautiful woman. Her form and coloring changed with my moving thoughts, but the idea that she existed remained to nag at me, and even though she was only a spook of my jealousy, I couldn’t stop the surge of fantasies about her and Stephen. By the time I left the library, I had invented several elaborate plots involving the two of them but hadn’t written a single word about Dorothea. At home I changed my clothes three times, and arrived at George’s twenty minutes late.
George opened the door, and I saw Stephen standing behind him. They greeted me in unison. Stephen’s face was flushed and the sleeves of his white shirt were unbuttoned and pushed up above his elbows. Maybe the room is warm, I thought, but when I stepped inside, the air was cool and I noticed that the windows were open. I could feel George’s eyes on me while I looked at Stephen, and I resisted the urge to turn toward him. George brought me a glass of wine, and I stood and listened to the night sounds at the window. I heard someone shout the name Paul. I waited for an answer. None came.
“You’re quiet,” said Stephen from behind me.
I spun around to answer him. His face had regained its usual pallor. He looked past me, and the aimlessness of his gaze irked me. “How was your date?” I said.
He gave me an uncomprehending look.
“You met someone this afternoon, didn’t you?”
“Oh, that,” he said. “It was okay.”
“Anyone I know?” I listened to the whine in my voice with a detached fascination. It was a false question. No answer would have pacified me. I had simply given in to a perverse need to ask, to expose and torment myself, and as soon as I heard the words, I experienced both relief and humiliation.
“Oh Iris,” he said. “Not another jealous fit.”
I walked away from him. My desires had begun to sicken me. They had grown old and tyrannical, driving me like brutal masters, and I understood then that I wanted them to die.
While we ate, I spoke mostly to George, as did Stephen. After dessert, George left the table and returned with a manila envelope, which he laid on the table in front of me. “Take a look at it,” he said.
Stephen, who was sitting next to me, leaned close to watch.
I opened the clasp and pulled out the large photograph. Despite my anxieties about the afternoon I had spent with George, I wasn’t prepared for what I saw. At first I didn’t even recognize myself. The person in the picture seemed to bear no resemblance to me, and for an instant I thought George had made a mistake, had given me the wrong photo, but then I saw myself, and I had a peculiar sensation of recovery, of remembering a forgotten event, something unpleasant and disorienting. I tried to catch it, but it was like the fragment of a dream that surfaces for a moment during the day, brought forth by a sight or sound, and then retreats—as quickly as it came—into unconsciousness. I put the picture down on the table but picked it up again.
It wasn’t a full-body shot. I was cut off below my breasts, and my extended arms were severed at the elbows. Photographs are cropped in all sorts of ways, and the results are seldom disturbing. The viewer fills in the missing pieces, but this picture was different. The convention didn’t seem to work, and I had the awful impression that the parts of me that weren’t in the photo were really absent. I didn’t understand it at the time, but I’ve thought about it so often since, I’ve come to believe that this effect was created by the fact that what appeared of me inside the photograph was also fragmented. A long piece of hair was swept across my right cheek and part of my mouth, slicing my face in two. A dark shadow beneath my uplifted chin made my head appear to float away from my body. My whole face lacked clarity, in part because the light was obscure, but also because the expression I had was nonsensical, an inward leer or grimace that signified no definite emotion or even sensation. It was a face without reason, and I hated it. I am not that, I thought, and let the photograph fall from my hands to the table.
Stephen picked it up immediately and held it out in front of him. He made a sound between his teeth, a long breathy whistle I had never heard from him before, and his face, which I saw in profile, had collapsed into an unfamiliar softness. He gazed at the picture and nodded his head slowly up and down.
“Stephen,” I said in a barely audible voice. He didn’t acknowledge me. “Stephen!” I said again.
“What is it?” He didn’t look at me.
“The picture, it’s . . .”
“Astonishing,” he said.
I tentatively put my fingers to his bare arm, but he moved it away from my touch. “No,” I whispered to him. “It’s terrible. You must see that. It’s cruel.”
He spoke in a loud, clear voice that shamed me. “What are you saying, Iris? Speak up.” I looked around for George, who seemed to have left the room, but then I saw him standing on the other side of the room, leaning against the wall smoking. I caught his eye. He had been observing us closely. I was certain of that. But to what purpose?
“What do you think?” George said to me.
“It doesn’t look like me,” I said. “To be honest, I think there’s something ugly about it—”
George interrupted me. “And what does Stephen think?”
Stephen lifted his head toward his friend. “I think,” he said, “that you probably don’t know what you’ve done. It’s all here, George, everything you were looking for.” And with that, he returned to the photograph. His unblinking gaze reminded me of some animals whose eyes appear totally inert, almost blind, and suddenly I had the feeling that for Stephen I had become invisible. An unexpected turn had been taken, and I had dropped out of sight.
• • •
After that evening, Stephen was distant. Although he called me often, he seemed reluctant to take me to his apartment, and I was almost never there. We were at odds, and despite my firm resolutions to win him back with a weightless charm, the stone I carried in my chest made it impossible. With Stephen, I had become a sour, witless bore. With others, I could be light. Men I cared nothing about called me, and every once in a while, I accepted an invitation. On them my indifference worked like an aphrodisiac. Because I didn’t want anything, I felt free and jabbered away, spinning out all kinds of silliness that seemed only to augment their desire. At the end of such an evening I would close my door on the hopeful face and go to bed alone, and as I lay there I would feel bad for the man I had left in the hallway and ashamed for the coquette in me—that ridiculous female figure who made her appearance only when I was truly lonely and sad.
The photograph surfaced in my mind from time to time as an object of regret, but I thought the worst was over and tried to put it behind me. Then after I had a chance encounter with him on the street, Stephen disappeared. I saw him with a little redhead, no more than eighteen years old. She was pretty, frail, and expensively dressed. They were talking, and in Stephen’s posture I could see his intent. He was leaning over her, his shoulders hunched. I knew him. He didn’t seduce with jokes. He carried women off on a cloud of seriousness. And then I ruined it for him. I approached them and embraced Stephen, asking for an introduction to the girl. Her name was Lily. “What a beautiful name,” I said, watching Stephen’s face harden. Before leaving them, I kissed Stephen’s tight mouth firmly and passionately. As I turned, I saw her green eyes widen, probing him. It was over, I didn’t look back. I ran home and threw four new glasses against the wall. Twelve dollars plus tax into the garbage.
Eight days passed. Stephen didn’t call, and he was nowhere to be found. The carrel he used in the library was vacant. He didn’t appear in the one class we had together and was missing from all his usual haunts. I fought my urge to telephone him and called George instead. He was the only one I told about the scene with the redhead, but I related the incident as a l
ittle comedy, and we both laughed about it. Although George had probably seen Stephen or had at least spoken to him, I knew that to press him for information about his friend would constitute a breach of loyalties, and I held my tongue.
On the ninth day, I couldn’t stand it any longer. Armed with the pathetic pretext of returning a book, I decided to pay Stephen a visit. I walked the two blocks to his building, entered the outside door with an old man who knew me by sight, took the elevator to the fifth floor, and was soon standing outside Stephen’s apartment. I took a deep breath and knocked. There was no answer. I knocked again more loudly. Still there was no response. He’s out with the redhead, I thought. I knocked one last time and tried the doorknob. It turned and I pushed the door open. I stepped inside and called to Stephen without closing the door. From where I stood, I could see that the bedroom window was ajar. A draft blew across my face, and I jumped as I heard the door slam behind me. I tiptoed into the bedroom and, seeing no one, knocked on the bathroom door. Stephen’s silence took on an ominous quality. He’s dead, I thought. He’s been dead for days, lying behind that door. I turned the knob and pushed, but it was stuck. Then I put my whole weight into the motion and nearly fell into the tiny bathroom. No Stephen. I looked back into the bedroom and noticed a half-drunk cup of coffee on the desk. When I bent over to see if it was cold, I saw the photograph, or rather part of it, protruding from under a magazine.
Seeing it there gave me a start. Stupidly, I had never imagined it out of George’s possession. It was probably a copy. The very idea that there was more than one photograph jarred me, and I was struck by a fantasy of its proliferation—my image multiplied into the thousands, scattered like so much litter in the streets of New York. I pulled it out and examined it for a second time. It can’t be as bad as I remember, I thought. I registered its parts: the face obscured by hair, the shadowed, empty neck, the arms cut at the elbows, the small breasts in my dark dress. What was it that had made me hate it? It isn’t ugly, I thought. It isn’t anything. Am I seeing it clearly? I studied it further and felt nothing. I recall noting the blankness of my response with surprise but continued to stare at it. I felt my head grow light as if I were going to faint, and I had a slight sensation of nausea. I grabbed Stephen’s desk chair with my free hand and sat down, still holding the photograph. I took a deep breath and turned my attention once again to the picture. The image was changing. With more curiosity than alarm, I noticed a small black hole in the face. How can that be? I said to myself. It wasn’t there before. But not for a moment did I doubt its reality. The hole grew, eating away the left eye and nose, and then the dread came, cold and absolute, a terror so profound it created a kind of paralysis. I was transfixed. The hole was devouring the entire image, the face and hair, the shoulders, breasts, and torso, and I saw only the arm stumps hanging there alone for an instant, and then they too were engulfed, but like a person in a dream, I couldn’t cry out. There was no sound in me, and I watched as the hole began to swallow the picture’s frame. I feared for my fingers but didn’t think to drop the photograph. It was bonded to my hands, a part of my limbs, and then I was blind. I don’t know when my vision returned. I must have lost consciousness briefly, but I remember that it was the light in the room I saw first, and it astonished me. Then I saw the objects on Stephen’s desk. They came into focus slowly—blurry, nameless things from another world. I heard breathing and thought there was someone else in the room before I realized it was my own respiration, loud and uneven like an invalid’s. The room returned to itself, and I saw the photograph lying facedown on the floor, an insignificant white rectangle.