behind it, moving around her, clicking away. I don’t remember stopping for anything, but I must have changed films, because I wound up with a dozen rolls at the end of the day.
I suppose you think that after the pictures were taken, I made love with her. Now, I’d be a liar if I said I’ve never screwed models in my time, and, for that matter, some of them have screwed me. But I didn’t touch her. She was my dream; and if you touch a dream it vanishes, like a soap bubble.
And anyway, I simply couldn’t touch her.
“How old are you?” I asked her just before she left, when she was pulling on her coat and picking up her bag.
“Nineteen,” she told me without looking around, and then she was out the door.
She didn’t say good-bye.
I sent the photos to Penthouse. I couldn’t think of anywhere else to send them. Two days later I got a call from the art editor. “Loved the girl! Real face-of-the-eighties stuff. What are her vital statistics?”
“Her name is Charlotte,” I told him. “She’s nineteen.”
And now I’m thirty-nine, and one day I’ll be fifty, and she’ll still be nineteen. But someone else will be taking the photographs.
Rachel, my dancer, married an architect.
The blonde punkette from Canada runs a multinational fashion chain. I do some photographic work for her from time to time. Her hair’s cut short, and there’s a smudge of gray in it, and she’s a lesbian these days. She told me she’s still got the mink sheets, but she made up the bit about the gold vibrator.
My ex-wife married a nice bloke who owns two video rental shops, and they moved to Slough. They have twin boys.
I don’t know what happened to the maid.
And Charlotte?
In Greece the philosophers are debating, Socrates is drinking hemlock, and she’s posing for a sculpture of Erato, muse of light poetry and lovers, and she’s nineteen.
In Crete she’s oiling her breasts, and she’s jumping bulls in the ring while King Minos applauds, and someone’s painting her likeness on a wine jar, and she’s nineteen.
In 2065 she’s stretched out on the revolving floor of a holographic photographer, who records her as an erotic dream in Living Sensolove, imprisons the sight and sound and the very smell of her in a tiny diamond matrix. She’s only nineteen.
And a caveman outlines Charlotte with a burnt stick on the wall of the temple cave, filling in the shape and the texture of her with earths and berry dyes. Nineteen.
Charlotte is there, in all places, all times, sliding through our fantasies, a girl forever.
I want her so much it makes me hurt sometimes. That’s when I take down the photographs of her and just look at them for a while, wondering why I didn’t try to touch her, why I wouldn’t really even speak to her when she was there, and never coming up with an answer that I could understand.
That’s why I’ve written this all down, I suppose.
This morning I noticed yet another gray hair at my temple. Charlotte is nineteen. Somewhere.
ONLY THE END OF THE WORLD AGAIN
It was a bad day: I woke up naked in the bed with a cramp in my stomach, feeling more or less like hell. Something about the quality of the light, stretched and metallic, like the color of a migraine, told me it was afternoon.
The room was freezing—literally: there was a thin crust of ice on the inside of the windows. The sheets on the bed around me were ripped and clawed, and there was animal hair in the bed. It itched.
I was thinking about staying in bed for the next week—I’m always tired after a change—but a wave of nausea forced me to disentangle myself from the bedding and to stumble, hurriedly, into the apartment’s tiny bathroom.
The cramps hit me again as I got to the bathroom door. I held on to the door frame and I started to sweat. Maybe it was a fever; I hoped I wasn’t coming down with something.
The cramping was sharp in my guts. My head felt swimmy. I crumpled to the floor, and, before I could manage to raise my head enough to find the toilet bowl, I began to spew.
I vomited a foul-smelling thin yellow liquid; in it was a dog’s paw—my guess was a Doberman’s, but I’m not really a dog person; a tomato peel; some diced carrots and sweet corn; some lumps of half-chewed meat, raw; and some fingers. They were fairly small pale