no illusions.
So who is it, exactly, that we think we’re fooling?
She lets you — no, wants you to take dirty pictures of her. “Come on!” she says. “Just for you,” she says, “you know, for when we can’t be together.”
So there you are. Hiding from your wife. On a Wednesday night in one of your eleven bathrooms with your Armani pants around your ankles. A forty-two-year-old man worth hundreds of millions of dollars, a king, masturbating like a schoolboy over a single page torn from
Hustler
because you can’t wait for the weekend.
Except it isn’t a page from a magazine. It’s a Polaroid of her on the beach. You have others but this is your favorite. She is leaning back against a large rock. It is craggy and ferrous, an enormous glossy clot. Just to the left of it, at the edge of the picture, in the distance on the white beach, people can be made out sunbathing, families. The beach is so white they seem like drawings on a piece of paper. You don’t remember framing the picture so they could be seen, you’re almost certain you didn’t mean to. She is wearing the bikini you bought her, the $340 bikini that is mostly little ropes. With her right hand she is lifting her left breast up and out of the bikini, towards her tiny mouth, her extended, curled tongue. Her head is bent down as far as it will go, her blond hair cascading, veiling the right side of her body down to her stomach. Her eyes are closed. Her left hand is thrust inside her bikini bottoms. Her hair and her tongue glisten as do the most polished, most metallic edges of the rock forming a drunken spider’s web behind her. If you look closely, and you have, you can see the sun reflected in her tongue stud. A brilliant, painful point.
There are so many things about this picture that can make you cum. The fact that her eyes are closed as if she were in a deep and dreamless sleep. The metal in her tongue so close to the puckered, pink flesh of her nipple. Her tan right arm curving across her body, striped like a tiger by her hair. And, perhaps most of all, her bikini bottoms raised into ridges by her fingers, the highest peak the bump of what you know is the middle joint of her middle finger, poised to push into herself.
She’s mad to take risks like that, crazy. Masturbating behind a rock on a crowded beach and letting you take pictures of her. Doesn’t she understand she — you — we — could get caught? Doesn’t she understand exactly how close to the edge we all are? But then, she has nothing to lose. And it is because she is mad that you must be with her. Because her madness is infectious.
When you are done you are suddenly filled not with guilt but with terror. You are afraid someone might somehow find the pictures. Afraid you will go to jail. Afraid you will lose everything you have. But most of all, you are afraid of the embarrassment. No one will understand everything she is to you, that she is everything to you, that she is worth the risk, that without her everything you have is nothing. No one will understand any of this. You will just be someone who made an underage girl pose for dirty pictures, someone who collected child pornography.
And you swear to yourself you’ll get rid of the pictures first thing in the morning. You swear to yourself that this time it’s just for the night you’re putting them back in their strongbox which is itself in the safe in your study.
And you may even keep your promise. It’s possible that your resolve will in fact remain in the morning. That you’ll burn them.
But a few weeks later, she’ll convince you to take some more in the back stacks at a public library. And she won’t have to try very hard.
“‘I have many possessions there that I left behind when I came here on this desperate venture, and from here there is more gold, and red bronze, and fair-girdled women, and grey iron I will take back; all that was allotted to me. But my prize; he who gave it, powerful Agamemnon, son of
Dean Wesley Smith, Kristine Kathryn Rusch
Martin A. Lee, Bruce Shlain