Lawrence Block - No Score

Then he was ready, and Aileen gave an odd little smile and got up on top of this dark green velvet couch. She gave a tug and lifted her dress up over her head and tossed it across the room out of camera range.

There was nothing under it but Aileen.

Oh, I thought. Nude pictures. Cheesecake, so to speak. Now I understood.

But not entirely.

“It’s a mutual thing we’ve got going.” Aileen said, spreading her legs. “It’s actually a beautiful relationship, Chip. See, Greg takes my picture, and in return I take his.”

I looked at Greg. He was buried under the black cloth and looked as though he was part of the camera apparatus. I looked at Aileen again. She had her hands between her legs, one on each side of what I was looking at.

“Only I have a built-in camera,” she was saying, “and I don’t have to futz around with floodlights or exposure settings. I just take aim and snap away. Say cheese, Greg.”

Greg didn’t say anything. I suppose he was still under the hood.

I wasn’t looking at him, actually.

My mouth was as dry as a sand sandwich and I had this weird chilly sweat all over my hands and feet and under my arms. And I couldn’t quite catch my breath, and I couldn’t stop shaking all over, and I couldn’t take my eyes off the most fantastic thing I had ever seen in my life.

The shutter worked.

“Click!” Aileen said.

For a little over an hour i stood there with my eyes falling out of my head while Gregor took filthy pictures of his wife. After her opening round of flashy repartee, Aileen didn’t have anything to say. Gregor stayed under the black cloth, and stayed quiet. And believe me, I didn’t say word one. A lot of things came to mind, I’ll admit, but I kept them to myself.

One idea that I couldn’t get out of my head was that this was all a dream, and if that was so, I had to be very careful not to do anything to wake myself up before the dream turned wet. Because dream or no, I was in what you might term a state of advanced physical excitement.

It was really fantastic.

I don’t know if I can clue you in as to just what it was like in that little room. (Which is probably a pretty dumb thing for me to say, for Pete’s sake, because I’m supposed to be writing this, and if I can’t handle it, that means I’m wasting both our time, and that it’s going to be a long siege of Maine sardines and day-old bread.) Seriously, I could try to put down all the poses Aileen struck and to say which ones made me the horniest and all, and if I did this, well, you might begin to get your own idea of what it was like in there, but I’m not all that certain it would add up to anything.

Well, just as an idea of the whole approach the two of them had, this was how Gregor used up one particular roll of film. He did several rolls of individual series work, which came to an even dozen pictures, which would eventually get wrapped up and sold together, and which would tell some vague sort of a story.

This particular one was the banana series, and it started off with a muffled voice from under the black cloth saying, “The banana, keed.” At which point Aileen got off the couch, went to Gregor’s bag of tricks, found a pair of ripe bananas, and got back on the couch.

I remember seeing those pictures, the banana set, after they were developed and printed. And if you hit them in order and were in the frame of mind to believe them, it really looked as though old Aileen was getting her cookies that way. It was pretty realistic.

Only an hour or so had passed when Gregor came up for air. His forehead was dripping with sweat. I guess it was pretty hot under the black cloth. It wasn’t all that cool anywhere else in the room, either.

“Wraps it up,” he said. He dug his cigarettes out of his shirt pocket, lit one for himself, and offered the pack to me. I shook my head. Some people are just physically incapable of believing that some other people don’t smoke. He tossed the pack and the matches to Aileen and she lit up and tossed them back. It was all very casual, almost athletic, with all of this underhand lobbing of cigarette packs and matchbooks. You could almost forget that Aileen was stark naked, and that she had spent the past hour holding her labia open and sucking on her own nipples and sticking bananas up herself. (I don’t know if I ought to be quite that graphic about it, but that was what she was doing, and I think it would be worse to try being coy about it, for Pete’s sake. I mean, if you’re going to come right out and say that a woman posed for a batch of dirty pictures while you stood there watching, you might as well call a spade a spade, right?)

Aileen blew out a cloud of smoke. She said, “Is that all you want to shoot?”

“I think so, yeah.”

“I thought you were going to take some pornographic ones.”

I didn’t do an enormous double take on that line. I just thought I was hearing wrong.

But he said, “Hard-core? No, the sonofabitching timer is on the fritz. I don’t know what’s the matter with it. Less than two years old and it just went. Nothing works anymore and nobody gives a damn. The whole civilization is coming apart at the seams.”

I must have looked puzzled. Aileen said, “It’s a timer on the shutter. He sets up the shot and then he has fifteen seconds to get in the picture with me.”

“Twelve seconds,” Gregor said.

She ignored the correction. “That way we can do the more interesting things, Chip. What you could call hard-core pornography.”

I nodded.

“What we shot now tonight is called soft-core.”

“What’s the difference?”

“Redeeming social importance,” Gregor said.

“Huh?”

“That’s what the Supreme Court calls it. You know, that you can argue it’s a work of art and not a hundred percent obscene. If you actually show people fucking, then it’s considered a hundred percent obscene.”

“In hard-core pornography,” Aileen said, “the man’s core is hard.”

“That’s an old gag,” Gregor said.

“Professional humor,” she said.

“But the point is that the timer is on the bum.” He sucked on his cigarette and clucked his tongue pensively. “I’ll tell you something, you wouldn’t believe what a short time twelve seconds is until you tried to set up a shot and then get in it yourself. You know the worst part?”

“What?” I managed to ask.

“Staying up. You know, erect.” His eyes dropped to his trouser front, and mine fought the impulse to follow. “When you set up with the camera and all, you know, your whole concentration is on technical matters. You don’t even think sex. You might have trouble believing this, but when I’m taking these pictures, there’s no difference in my mind whether I’m taking a picture of Aileen playing with herself or of the Chicago skyline. It’s all the same as far as I’m concerned.”

He was right. I had trouble believing this. I had seen the Chicago skyline, and I had seen Aileen playing with herself, and there was no chance I would ever get the two of them mixed up in my mind.

“So I set up a shot,” he went on, “and then I have to turn on the excitement so that I’ll get erect, and then rush rush rush to get into the right position before the sonofabitching shutter goes bang. It’s the most nerve-racking thing going. And the thing is, the way I like to work, you know, is to shoot as much film as fast as I can, just one picture after the other. Just keep watching through the viewer and click them off whenever the pose is right. And the same way, Aileen likes to get into the spirit of a sequence and let it build the right way.”

“To a climax,” she said, with a wink.

“Yeah, to a climax,” he said winklessly. “It’s the same as whatchamacallit, method acting. Living the part. Look, you don’t know the business, but I can tell you that if you looked at a set of the keed’s photos and a set of the average model, there would be all the difference in the world.” I had no trouble believing this. “The average girl, she’ll put on this sonofabitching mechanical smile that looks painted on her face, or maybe she’ll pout a little, and there’s nothing the least bit natural about it. Aileen, she’s something else. Sometimes I think she has, you know, a climax. Just going through the poses.”