Sarah Phillips by Andrea Lee (beach books .TXT) 📗

With girls of any color, Curry was popular. He was the most successful kind of flirt, the kind who really knows about women’s clothes, and who can look attentive through long monologues about emotions. He was also a wonderful photographer, and that was another way he attracted girls: he took arty portrait shots that became quite the thing in some circles at Harvard. In his pictures pretty girls perched in fey poses in the branches of trees in Radcliffe Yard or, in trailing Indian dresses, lounged against tombstones in Christ Church cemetery. Sometimes he photographed them nude, with contemplative expressions on their faces as they crouched inside cardboard boxes or huddled among heaps of crumpled newspaper. He was so successful at all this that he had already published several pictures—notably “Monica with Onionskin”—in photography magazines, and his telephone line (much to the envy of his suitemates, and to the studied indifference of Philippa) was murmurous with female voices.

Curry had been asking for a long time to do a portrait of me, but I just laughed at him. “You’re the last person I’d let take my picture,” I told him. “You know too much.”

I enjoyed his pictures, however, and I liked to sit and discuss with him the faces and figures of the girls he photographed. (He talked about girls in an abstruse intellectual manner that broke down sometimes into a fraternity-style appraisal of measurements.) And I liked to visit him in the darkroom at Carpenter Center for Visual Arts, where his curly head and intent, spoiled-boy’s face glowed through the red darkness, and in the intimate smell of chemicals we watched the developing pictures rise out of the paper.

One afternoon in mid-April of my sophomore year, Curry and I were sitting around in the living room of his suite, waiting for Philippa to arrive so that we could all go down for an early dinner. (It was roast-beef-and-ice-cream night at Winthrop House.) Half an hour before, we’d had a beer with Curry’s suitemate Grant, a burned-out surfer from a rich family that seemed to own half of Honolulu. (I often thought that the three suitemates, Grant, Curry, and Ted—a shy black work-study student from the Mississippi Delta—formed an interesting social continuum.) Talking to suntanned Grant, who found it hard to put three sentences together without using the words “bummer” or “dynamite weed,” had depressed me; after he left to sleep in the library, I sat dispiritedly on the sagging twin bed that served as a couch, looking at a contact sheet of pictures Curry had taken of Philippa during a weekend on Nantucket.

“She looks fantastic here,” I said to Curry, who was sitting cross-legged in a big red leather chair that had yellowish stuffing showing through a dozen tears and slashes. “Ten times more alive than in real life. How did you do it?”

“That’s an incredibly nasty thing to say, but I know what you mean. Sometimes she works better for me on film.”

He had been splicing together one of his obscure blues tapes—it was typical of Curry to be pedantic about music, and meticulous in the upkeep of his elaborate stereo system—but suddenly, in one agile movement, he laid down the tape and swung his skinny legs to the floor. “Come on, Sarah, let me take your picture. Right now. You haven’t been thinking about it, so you’ll be natural.”

“But Phil’s coming for dinner.”

“That won’t make any difference. She’s cool. She watches me shoot all the time. Come on, there’s enough light. I’ll set up the tripod.”

“Do you want me to take off my clothes?”

For less than a second—one of the infinitesimal fragments of time that determine how a remark is given or received—Curry hesitated. Then he said, in his normal relaxed, teasing voice: “Well, I think that’s the best thing you can do. We can roll you up in Grant’s tapa cloth, or have you climbing the bookcases, or something. We might get some fantastic shots.”

I went into Curry’s bedroom and pushed the door three-quarters closed. It seemed stupid to be modest about the act of undressing when I was willing to prance around naked in front of a camera; I was surprised to find, however, that I was deeply unwilling to have Curry see me in the graceless process of disrobing: legs stuck in my jeans and underwear, head lost in my sweater. When I had pulled off my clothes, I tossed them onto Curry’s bed, a big double mattress he and Philippa had bought from the Salvation Army. It lay on the floor, almost filling the tiny room, covered with rumpled sheets and bearing on one pillow an ashtray full of dried-out apple cores. Over the desk and the crammed bookshelf beside the bed were taped photographs and contact sheets, as well as three posters that showed Curry’s eccentric range of interests: a black and red notice for a Caribbean Marxist rally, a poster from a psychedelic minimalist exhibition that depicted what looked like a radioactive pea, and an enlarged reproduction of a Burne-Jones angel.

From outside the window came the sleepy mumbling of a pigeon that had somehow managed to land there despite the anti-pigeon spikes on the outer sill. I could see part of a brick wall, and a few bits of ivy flapping in the breeze. The suite was overheated as usual, and it felt good to be out of my clothes. I looked down at my body, which I knew was pretty, and felt a frisky excitement in being able to show it off to Curry. It was strange, I thought, that we had never seen each other naked before: at that time the groups of friends we both went around with found constant excuses to have chaste, tingly nude encounters, all organized in the name of a specious artistic freedom.

When I came out of the bedroom, I called mockingly, “Get ready for the thrill of your life!”

Curry had been adjusting the height of the tripod. When he looked up, there was another