the smoke hung, for a second. “This will be beautiful,” she said. “And true.”
I waited a moment for her to go on. When she didn’t, I said, “That’s still only four.”
“Four what?”
“Sets of headphones.”
She glared at me, then cackled. “I didn’t know you could be such a rompicazzo, Nora. I like this very much. Very much.”
After I made coffee, she said: “The photographs. Before you go, you must look at the photographs. Because I’ve got to order the prints in France. As always, they should have had the order yesterday. They’re to be on muslin, very big, almost seven feet tall—even with the computers now this isn’t so easy, the size of it, on fabric, and to make seven, it takes time. There isn’t much time, now.”
“Yes,” I said. “I guess that’s true. So little time.” The week before, when she’d told me the date for her show in Paris, seemed very long ago. Suddenly everything was over: the focus had changed. The Shahids were all looking away from me now. We were hurtling, or I was, toward the end of it all. The terminal patient headlong toward death. The very awareness of finitude speeding everything up, when you most wanted to slow it all. I knew that wasn’t what Sirena meant. She meant that there was so little time until her show. So little time until she was lost to me.
“Show them to me then,” I said. “Let’s get on with it.”
The little girl wasn’t so little as all that. I was almost shocked, but also deeply moved, to see her naked. It was a part of Sirena’s purpose that the child not be five or six, because there’s no shame in being naked at that age, the washboard-fronted children with their unobtrusive boy and girl genitals all but interchangeable along the beachfronts. No, the shock lay in seeing the newly awakening body of this child who must have been around eleven—who was, Sirena confirmed, eleven—the poignant, rosy puff of her breast buds, the nascent rounding of the hip below her waist, but these curves just a suggestion still upon the tight band of her torso, the long, straight perfect limbs of a still god-held child, trailing her clouds of Wordsworthian glory. And there, at the pubis, a few dark strands, the beginning of her hiddenness, but the tidy, childish split of her still frank and clear to the world. In all of them, she stood straight, leaning slightly on her left hip, her right foot slightly splayed, its angle minutely shifting from frame to frame. One hand, her left, reached toward the camera, loomed larger, its smooth square fingernails both carrying, and grasping for, the promise of adulthood. None of the photos showed her face, but the exact cropping point differed, and in some, her chin and mouth were visible. They’d pulled her hair up, so you couldn’t even tell what color it might be, and she was defined, then, by the exposure of her delicate neck, like a stalk, slightly long for the rest of her, and fragile. In one picture—the one showing most of her, that Sirena wanted to use—she bit her lip slightly, and you could discern a mere hint of tooth, pressing the perfect ridged rose of her lip. It was breathtaking.
“You see, there, you understand, yes?” Sirena said. “It is the moment of hesitation: she reaches forward, but she’s uncertain. She wishes also that she might stay. She’s relaxed, but also awkward. A child, but not.”
“Which is why you absolutely cannot use this one,” I said. “Trust the photographer. Trust your friend. She knows what she’s talking about.”
Sirena threw up her hands again and rolled her phlegmy irritation in her throat.
“You’re just using one of the girl, right? Only one picture? Don’t you see, if you use that one, it may seem clear to you what story it’s telling, but precisely because of her mouth, because of that tooth, it’s actually telling a story in a way the others aren’t. And as soon as it’s telling a story, people can interpret it however they want, they can take that picture and put their own story onto it. And even if it seems so clear to you what it says, you can’t control what they think it says. I thought that was central to your Wonderland, that each experience of it should be open, unique.”
“Yes, of course, but this picture—”
“To you it says, ‘I hesitate on the cusp of knowledge.’ And to a hundred