partly hoping that the studio would be exactly as I’d left it, that whatever had been going on—something had been going on—it would have been big enough to keep her away.
Already in the stairwell there were sounds. Wafty Eastern music, not her usual thing, chatter, banging. There was the movement of life, of lives. As I walked down the corridor, I thought maybe she was having a party; but the sounds weren’t party sounds.
They didn’t hear me come in. They were too busy. That’s not quite true: one young woman, in her mid-twenties, in a skimpy black tunic with huge eyes, a very white face and curly ringlets of that rare auburn that looks dyed even when it’s not, broke away from the huddle and came toward me.
“I’m so sorry. Is the noise bothering you?”
“This is my studio,” I said. Not nicely. I couldn’t help it. My eyes turned on my own end of the L, to my table and my things. Someone had dropped her jacket carelessly over my work chair, and had slung shopping bags and a handbag on the floor beside it; but otherwise my stuff, from a distance, looked okay. I could see the jagged pile of Polaroids on my side table: I couldn’t tell whether that was where I’d left them, or whether they’d been moved. “Who are you?” I asked, trying with only minimal success to sound less annoyed. “And what are you doing here?”
“I’ll tell Sirena you’re here—you must be Nora?” I could see from her glance—down, up, down, resting on my dowdy clogs, that I wasn’t as she’d expected. “I’m Becca,” she said. “I’m the makeup artist.”
Upon entering the studio, here’s what I saw: Sirena, at the center of a small clutch of dark-clad people, in dim light, huddled around a film camera. Sirena was the director, I guess. The camera person was a lanky guy with a shaven head and a silver bullet in his dark eyebrow. He had a dotting of stubble, like smut, across his chin, and a black T-shirt from which his long arms stuck out white in the gloom. Later, when he stood up, I’d see that he was enormously tall, at least six and a half feet. He was the only man.
Aside from Sirena and Becca, there were three or four other women. One of them seemed to be responsible for the lighting, and darted down into the Wonderland area to fuss with spotlights and two big silver reflecting screens. They were all young except for a tall, long-nosed woman in her late forties or early fifties, with big dark hair and stylish red rectangular glasses. She was a friend of Sirena’s, Marlene, a Hungarian photographer from LA, in town on a Radcliffe fellowship.
They were all focused on a woman in white, head to toe in pure white, with a funny tall white cap covering her hair, like a Smurf’s cap without the fold—it stood straight up. All you could see of her body was her face, including her ears, which stuck out, and her hands and feet, which were a lovely even light brown. She wore a long-sleeved plain white dress with an enormous skirt and white leggings. She seemed to grow out of the Astroturf like the carved flowers around her.
Becca scurried over and whispered to Sirena, who swiveled on her high stool (where, too, had that come from?) and blew me kisses with both hands. But she didn’t get up: she indicated that she couldn’t, right now; and so I put my things down and made my way over to the camera as they turned on some Eastern music, a mesmerizing sort of whiny wavering, and started filming again.
At once, the woman in white began to spin, first slowly and then at greater speed, and the vast circle of her skirt billowed out, rippling gorgeously up and down. The wind it made shook the aspirin flowers on their stalks, and they, too, danced. I could see her actually dancing, down at the end of the studio, and then, in the camera’s screen, a miniature version of her dancing also, and the two sights were the same but different. When I looked at her in real life, she seemed to me almost to create a haze around her, a visible air; but in its tiny-fying precision, the camera recorded her spinning like a science.
I stayed for more than an hour, but they were still working when I left. In fact, I left during a