All You Could Ask For A Novel - By Mike Greenberg Page 0,36

least a half-dozen occasions, and usually she brings over a hundred images to choose from. Here there were only eight. I looked at her and frowned.

“Were the rest so awful you couldn’t bear to show me?”

Her smile was filled with reassurance. “Quite the opposite. These, my dear, are perfect. I don’t want you going through shot after shot comparing how your naked ass looks in this one versus that. You are so beautiful in these eight pictures it makes me cry.”

I picked up the one on top, handling it gingerly, as though it might tear into pieces if it grazed my fingernail. I was in front of a giant window, facing out, and the sun was streaming over me. My face was turned upward into the light. The arch of my back looked sexy and sleek and my breasts were like shadows. It was stunning. My eyes filled with tears as I gently placed the sheet back on the table and lifted the next, in which I was turned away from the camera, standing amid the overflowing collection of potted plants in Pamela’s den. My butt looked full and round but not soft. My right hand was reaching out, my fingers caressing the leaves of an orchid, something very sensual in the touching.

“That one is my favorite,” Pamela said.

I smiled. “I’ve always had a great ass,” I said.

The rest of the pictures were just as perfect as the first two. Pamela had chosen exactly right. She had known exactly what I wanted them to be and she had nailed it. The photos were sexy, sophisticated, daring, tasteful. They were beautiful.

When I was finished looking at them, I leaned back on the couch. “Pamela, these are precisely as I imagined them. How did you capture exactly what was in my mind?”

“That’s what art is, my dear,” she said. “It is your imagination come to life.”

“But this was my imagination,” I said. “It’s your work.”

“Is it, Brooke?” she asked. “Look at them again. Who do you see in these images?”

I picked one up, held it close to my face.

“This is your work,” she said to me. “It’s your art. I just pressed the buttons.”

KATHERINE

ANOTHER DAY, ANOTHER YEAR older, same greeting for the break of dawn.

Fuck him.

Today, the words have a particularly pungent taste in my mouth, because today I need to talk to Phil. I am always especially aggravated when my day begins in his office, which usually happens two or three times a month and never of my own choosing. In all the years I have been working beneath him, which is well more than ten, today is the first time I’ve ever called him for a meeting.

May I be filled with loving-kindness

May I be well

May I be peaceful and at ease

May I be happy

After the breathing and the protein shake and the heavy sweating on the treadmill, I am at my mirror, contemplating Buddhism and my blind hatred for Phillip. They do not really go together, and yet I believe in them both to the deepest place in my soul. Thich Nhat Hanh writes that one of our biggest faults is to fail to celebrate not having a toothache. The idea goes something like this: We all know how painful and irritating it can be to have a toothache, and we all suffer when we do, but why is it we never take time to think how nice it is not to have a toothache?

That’s brilliant, I think, and insightful, and it applies to absolutely everything, but it does not answer one fundamental question: What do you do when your toothache never goes away?

I know what you’re thinking, and you’re right. Phillip isn’t a toothache. He may have begun that way, but when we have a toothache we visit the dentist and alleviate the pain. For nearly twenty years now I have been putting off that visit. I could go any time I choose, I could forget about our time together, move past it, work anywhere else for anyone else and never see Phillip again, and yet I do not, and that is no one’s fault but my own. In that way, I guess it is less like having a toothache than it is like driving a sharp stick into your own mouth and leaving it there for twenty years, which is a pretty stupid thing to do and I know that, and still I hold on to my stick. And every time I feel the pain, I repeat the