Emily St. John Mandel - The Singer's Gun

“It’s still very much on the side of art,” Leigh said. “Or if it’s moved toward pornography, it’s in the hinterlands between the two.” The next picture was of a woman sitting on a chair, legs spread wide, naked from the waist down with her head thrown back. Elena wanted to ask how this was different from pornography, but the photographer was still talking. “I like to see it as art photography,” he said, “but thrown into the deep end, pushed over the edge. The idea is that the viewer is pushed toward the outer edge of — forgive me,” he said, “I get a little pedantic on the topic. I’ve been teaching a photography class.” Elena was looking at a photograph of two girls — a different duo — standing in a bathtub kissing, blurred behind a transparent shower curtain.

“Is your rate still twenty an hour?” Elena asked.

“Forty. You’re comfortable with the overall aesthetic?”

“Absolutely,” Elena said. Not counting the money Anton had sent her to pay for shipping the cat to Italy, she had less than a hundred dollars left in her checking account.

“But what I do need to see at this point,” the photographer said, “is what you look like naked.”

“But you’ve seen me naked. I used to pose for you.”

“That was nearly five years ago,” the photographer said. “People change in five years. I find it puts my models at ease. It may seem paradoxical, but if you think about it. .” He had stood up from the armchair, and he was closing the blinds. “I need to know what you look like naked — what you look like now, because bodies change in five years — and taking your clothes off for the first time is the hardest part.” He paused at a window, looking at something on the street, then closed the blinds and turned back to her. “This way, if you’re naked in front of me for a few minutes now, it’ll be easier to be naked for four hours when we meet next week for the session.”

“You said that five years ago.”

“It’s still true.”

Elena took her shirt off. She unfastened her bra and slid down her skirt with no trouble, and found that she could even look up at him once she’d taken off her underwear.

“Please,” he said, gesturing expansively.

Elena came out from behind the coffee table, and stood exposed on his living room floor.

“Nice,” he said. “You still have a good body.”

“Thanks.” She watched his face, obscurely anxious. His eyes drifted professionally downward.

“Can you trim?” he asked. “Not a lot, just a bit. Think of making it into a V-shape. Do you mind?”

She didn’t, although she was aware that her hands were shaking slightly. She was trying to remember if it had been like this the first time, five years ago, but found that she’d lost the memory.

“Can you turn around for me?”

She turned slowly away from him.

“Stop.”

She stood facing his tiny Manhattan kitchen, a closet-sized corner tiled in black with one wall painted the color of an emerald in sunlight. There was a Van Gogh postcard magneted haphazardly to the fridge, explosions of stars in a swirling sky.

“You have nice calves.”

“Thanks,” she said hollowly. She turned back toward him.

“When are you due?”

“What?”

He winked. “I can always tell,” he said.

It took her a moment to understand. “Oh, I’m not pregnant. ”

Leigh didn’t look embarrassed, only surprised. “You’re positive about that?”

“Positive,” she said.

The photographer nodded and began moving back toward the armchair, and she understood this as her cue to get dressed again. She put her clothes back on and they spoke of practical things. Dates, methods of payment, the model release.

Twenty minutes later she found herself standing in the 81st Street Museum of Natural History subway station, looking at the tiled mosaic elephants and bats and sea turtles and frogs, realizing that actually she wasn’t positive at all.

“So, what did you do today?” Caleb asked.

He had come to bed earlier than usual but seemed unready to sleep. He lay on his back and she lay beside him with her head in the crook of his arm. Her thoughts were turned toward the Upper West Side, toward the photographer’s green kitchen wall and Sophie drifting across the intersection.

“Not much,” she said. “I met with the photographer.”

“That same one as before, right? Upper West Side?”

“The same one. Yes.”

“Have you given any more thought to finding a job?”

“I’m posing for him tomorrow. He pays more now than he used to.”

“I meant real work,” Caleb said.

“I hate real work.” She was trying to keep her voice light.

“Most people have to work, though, sweetie.” It was a delicate topic: he didn’t have to work, and he didn’t entirely understand. The closest Caleb could come to imagining what an office job might be like was to compare it to research, which he loved, or to depression, which the pills had eradicated so successfully and for so many years that it was beginning to seem abstract, a half-real memory of six months in the late ’90s when he hadn’t wanted to get out of bed, something that might have happened to somebody else.

“Aren’t you listening? That’s not what I’m saying at all,” Elena said. “Of course I have to work. I’m not suggesting that any alternative exists.”

“But maybe if you had a different kind of job,” Caleb said carefully. “You were happy when you were working as Anton’s assistant, weren’t you?”

“Was I? I don’t know, I suppose it’s a question of ratio. I was probably less unhappy more of the time.”

“Have you thought about going back to school?”

“So I could do what? Work in yet another job? It’s work itself, Caleb, it’s not the job I happen to be in. I don’t mean to go on and on about it, it’s just, I’m still. . I’ve been working since I was sixteen years old, except for that one semester at Columbia, and the initial shock of work hasn’t worn off yet. I still have these moments where I think, Come on, this can’t possibly be it. I cannot possibly be expected to do something this awful day in and day out until the day I die. It’s like a life sentence imposed in the absence of a crime.”

“Perhaps you should see someone,” Caleb said. He went to a psychiatrist once a month, and came back introspective and a little dazed.

“How could I see someone? I have no health insurance now, and anyway, I don’t want to see someone. I don’t want to be numbed.”

He was quiet.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“It’s okay. It must seem like that to you sometimes.”

“It does. I’m sorry.”

He stroked her face for a moment, withdrew his hand and kissed her on the forehead.

“Well,” he said, “we should probably get to sleep. I love you.”

“I love you too.”

Elena couldn’t sleep that night. After a while she got up and went to the kitchen. She turned on the light above the table. The clock above the stove was ticking loudly in the quiet. She was reading a two-day-old newspaper when the telephone rang at midnight.

“It’s okay,” Anton said when she told him. “Everyone loses their nerve sometimes.”

“I’m sorry, Anton. I’ll go back again.”

“You don’t have to,” he said, perfectly aware that his former secretary was incapable of leaving a project unfinished.

“Of course I’ll go back.” She was standing by the kitchen window, which was as far from the bedroom as a person could get and still be inside the apartment.

“Did you get the veterinary records?” he asked. “The vet was supposed to mail them to you.”

“I have them,” she said.