Smoke and Mirrors

She was in Penthouse that month. More coy and prim than before, waiting for me neatly between advertisements for stereos and Scotch. She was called Dawn, but she was still my Charlotte, with nipples like beads of blood on her tanned breasts, dark fuzzy thatch between forever legs, shot on location on a beach somewhere. She was only nineteen, said the text. Charlotte. Dawn.

Harry Bleak was killed traveling back from Morocco: a bus fell on him.

It’s not funny, really—he was on a car ferry coming back from Calais, and he snuck down into the car hold to get his cigars, which he’d left in the glove compartment of the Merc.

The weather was rough, and a tourist bus (belonging, I read in the papers, and was told at length by a tearful boyfriend, to a shopping co-op in Wigan) hadn’t been chained down properly. Harry was crushed against the side of his silver Mercdes.

He had always kept that car spotless.

When the will was read I discovered that the old bastard had left me his studio. I cried myself to sleep that night, got stinking drunk for a week, and then opened for business.

Things happened between then and now. I got married. It lasted three weeks, then we called it a day. I guess I’m not the marrying type. I got beaten up by a drunken Glaswegian on a train late one night, and the other passengers pretended it wasn’t happening. I bought a couple of terrapins and a tank, put them in the flat over the studio, and called them Rodney and Kevin. I became a fairly good photographer. I did calendars, advertising, fashion and glamour work, little kids and big stars: the works.

And one spring day in 1985, I met Charlotte.

I was alone in the studio on a Thursday morning, unshaven and barefoot. It was a free day, and I was going to spend it cleaning the place and reading the papers. I had left the studio doors open, letting the fresh air in to replace the stink of cigarettes and spilled wine of the shoot the night before, when a woman’s voice said, “Bleak Photographic?”

“That’s right,” I said, not turning around, “but Bleak’s dead. I run the place now.”

“I want to model for you,” she said.

I turned around. She was about five foot six, with honey-colored hair, olive green eyes, a smile like cold water in the desert.

“Charlotte?”

She tilted her head to one side. “If you like. Do you want to take my picture?”

I nodded dumbly. Plugged in the umbrellas, stood her up against a bare brick wall, and shot off a couple of test Polaroids. No special makeup, no set, just a few lights, a Hasselblad, and the most beautiful girl in my world.

After a while, she began to take off her clothes. I did not ask her to. I don’t remember saying anything to her. She undressed and I carried on taking photographs.

She knew it all. How to pose, to preen, to stare. Silently she flirted with the camera, and with me standing 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.