thousand people, that’s also what it says. And then to a hundred pervs in the hundred thousand, it says, ‘That little girl wants to fuck me. I knew it.’ ”
“But this is ridiculous—”
“Have you read Lolita? I rest my case.”
Sirena emitted more rumblings but she did not contest what I had said.
“This one,” I said, pointing to the headless version in which the girl’s neck looked most swanlike, and in which, also, the forefinger of the reaching left hand was slightly raised, and by some cast of the light, had around it a rim of shadow, accentuating also its length. It gave the photograph a slightly religious air, some echo of the gestures of medieval Madonnas. “This is the one you must use.”
“You really think so?”
“I know so.”
She sighed. “Maybe,” she said. “Maybe you’re right.” Which grudging comment caused me elation, until she went on, “I’ll ask Marlene to look again. She didn’t choose this one—hers is this”—she pointed at a different image—“but I see why you take this. It’s the finger, yes? You’re right about the finger. I didn’t remark it, but it’s true.”
The pictures that followed were of a twenty-two-year-old, whose moles decorated her fair skin like erotic paint splatters and whose mouth, a pretty bow-shaped mouth with a strong cleft in the upper lip, curled upward in what seemed to be barely contained amusement. There would be two of her, two of all of them henceforth, and in one she, too, stood straight to the camera, though with her hand coyly covering her privates; and in the other, half turned, with her arm extended in embrace of the air, you could apprehend in profile the ripe heft of her breast, with its sharp dark nipple, and the exuberant, even youthful, burst of pubic hair at her groin.
For midlife, Sirena had two sets of photographs. The first was of a tallish woman, slightly heavy in that ponderous, maternal way—her breasts full and unevenly drooping, their nipples pointing in faintly disparate directions like misaligned headlights. The skin of her round belly was puckered, presumably by childbearing, and this was at odds with the otherwise trunklike firmness of her, the fullness of an inhabited body, with its tracery of purpling veins upon the thighs and its scars—an appendix scar, and a seam, too, around one knee. The woman’s face was visible almost to her eyes—the strong lines from nose to mouth, the cheeks still round but less than fully plump, the incipient wattling beneath the chin. But in one of her two photographs, the one in which her strong, elegantly veined hand clasped her side, she was laughing, open-mouthed and laughing, and even without seeing her eyes you felt the strength of her, and she was beautiful.
I felt both envy and contempt for this faceless woman—forty-four years old, Sirena told me, with three children. I felt envy because my own body, for all it was younger in every aspect, for all it hewed, more closely, to some statuesque ideal—mine, I felt, was a body in waiting, a body yet unused. And while I had, at the first, an instinctive young person’s revolt at the careless blowsiness of this middle-aged body, I had also a sense of alarm that in spite of my efforts to stay young, time would ravage me also, and that like an unopened flower I might wither on the vine. Whereas this, I thought, is the open flower on the cusp of its fading: this is the fullness of life.
The second set of midlife photographs astonished me. At first I couldn’t think why they were there—why two models in this case?—but in an instant I recognized the silver chain around the neck, the curve of the nose, the clavicle with its single small mole, like a dark pearl.
“Why did you take yourself?”
“Well, this is the question. Marlene took these …” So Marlene had stood with the camera and recorded Sirena in her nakedness: somehow, for Marlene to do this was fine. “And really, she’s a better photographer than I am.”
“I don’t think so.”
“You’re very loyal. But the rest of the world thinks so, for a reason. So, if there are reasons to use my body—it’s the right age, I’m the artist, I’m not then asking anyone to do my nakedness for me, if you like …” She sighed. “And in such an installation, this is important, too. I want, as you say, for everyone to have their own journey in Wonderland, their own life’s journey. But I’m