Mo’ Mots

Now my costume is complete. We scatter the leftovers across the bed, I drizzle some on my stomach to hide a paunch. The iPod plays Justin’s “FutureSex/LoveSounds.”

In “American Beauty,” Mena Suvari’s character lies surrounded by vivid scarlet rose petals, arms grazing their velvety fibers, breasts artfully clothed, a bush sprouting from her lap. She’s a waif Venus, staring down at her admirer from his bedroom ceiling.

My photographer starts with the same long shot. He steps onto the mattress, pulling back his head and camera, straddling my body to get a bird eye’s view. His legs jiggle the mattress, his hand is uneven. I drag a cheap fake rose across my stomach and pray he doesn’t lose his balance.

The snap of the camera has a mechanical strength, punctuating the music with cacophonous beats. A light flashes. I blink. I’m combing my brain for an alluring pose, the right angle for my best hip. Is it sexy to smile? I clutch at the rose like a spear. He snaps.

He dismounts, reviews his pictures. He pulls the camera away, the Nikon strap straining against his neck as he reads the LCD. He doesn’t need to direct me–I can see all the command in his body, the scrutinizing face wrinkled in consternation, the skintight hipster jeans, the European sneakers, a simple polo stretched across a belly of only a true beer connoisseurs. Gray hairs brush through his thick black hair (which he’ll later claim indignantly is dark brown).

He comes back to the scene, turning to the head of the bed. Pressing his knees against the thin plywood bedframe, he scoots the bed with me on top a foot or two away from the wall. I look up at him, my irises threatening to ogle my brain. Snap. A smile curls my Kewpie doll lips. Snap. He climbs atop the bed, and I’m staring at the crotch of his jeans. I bend my knees, point my toes. The camera chatters. I pull my brown hair. I am giving face. Staring into the layers of glass. Squinted eyes, pursed lips, chin up.

He lies down beside me. I turn my head to keep the gaze. “I’m going to get in your face.,” he says. “This is going to look great.” The lens is inches away from my nose. I hold my breath, afraid to fog up the glass.

He captures all the minuscule movements of my face, from the twitch of my magenta lips, the bat of my mascaraed lashes, the rosy flush blooming on the apples of my cheeks and spreading down to the tops of my breasts. All of it, snapped. I bend my elbow, cup my hand, thumb at my bedside cheek, fingertips at temples. My eyes look searchingly. This is the moneyshot.

He is done. He reviews the photos again, all 86. I turn off the music, pass my clothes on the floor. Crawling onto the bed still in flower top and bottom, I peer over his shoulder. It is only through his eyes, no, his lens that I see myself. Here is a woman, alabaster skin, hellenistic stretch of nose, curious and questioning eyes lost in widened pupils.

He brings the beauty out in me. I ask him when I’ll see him again.

We dump the flowers onto the bed, and having armed myself with masking tape, I start covering the facade of lace over my nude bra. The expanse of my leopard print panties now seems daunting, the boyshort cut wide enough to cover my cello-curved hips.

My body becomes a canvas, and for the first time we are in our bodies, face to face. It is too intimate a scene, despite my covering with the flimsy daisies. I twist my body to cover the frontier of a sloping breast pushing against a cup. He watches me, his eyes following my fingers. There is no mirror in the room–I cannot see what he sees, but I can imagine that this costuming is far more erotic than any disrobing. Despite the unfamiliar eyes on me, despite the goosebumps dotting my limbs, the physical distance between us, I am comfortable in my own skin. It is an intimacy shared, from fingers to eyes.

I cannot meet his eyes. I pick up a dark cut-out, petals surrounding the boyish face of Leonardo DiCaprio. I push into my nipple, opposite one of Dick Cheney. “Can you help me?” I ask.

“What?” He’s brought into the moment with me.

I stick another flower on my hipbone, avoid his gaze. “I can’t see what it all looks like. Can you cover up any holes?”

“OK.” He jabs his short fingernails into a pile of paper, folds the tape on one side. Hovering with the flower, he scans my body, from top to bottom, settling on an area farthest away from trouble.

Lying down, I continue planting the hills of my chest: the sides of my breasts, underneath, the triangular peak into brastraps. Every so often another flower is patted down on my panties. Then he stops.

“Is it all done?” I ask.

He  steps back, like an artist examining a work in progress. “There’s … uhh … one spot left.”

“Can you cover it then?”

He pinches a petal of a flower, his fingers leaving it damp when he thrusts it into my palm. “I think you should do it.”

He motions my hand down, between my thighs. “Where?” I ask.

“To the left, a little bit. No, now up. Yeah. Wait, back to the right–”

“You just do it!” I stick the flower on my right thigh.

He peels it off, tentatively.

“It’s … uhh … it’s in a weird space.”

“Well, I can’t see anything.” The flowers bunch around in hills, petals obscuring sight into the valley below.

He moves forward, and hangnails brush against inner thighs, babyflesh. His hands forces my legs apart. Goosebumps rising on limbs, I wait for his touch. He pokes the flower on my bundle of nerves.

A giggle bubbles from my throat, petals rustle against each other as my chest shakes.

“I’m sorry!” He’s cautious, ashamed.

“Tickles,” I explain.

I squished my eyes closed, pushing out the tears. I rolled over. I felt the depression in the bed, and I curled into it.

Day of the sexy shoot, I hold up cheeky pink leopard print panties for him to see. “I’m not doing it naked,” I say, and I offer him a choice of this pair or hot pink boyshorts. He’s flustered with the shock of diving into my treasure chest of lingerie, so I choose for him. I go for the animal.
We cut up 60s-esque daisy patterns from the newspaper, gray and pink petals. His flowers are awkward, the blossoms wilted and withered rejects. Even between us it’s awkward, especially after it has been so hot behind our computer screens.

“How many damn languages do you know?” I had written him. “Keep going–it’ll be like in ‘A Fish Called Wanda’ when Otto speaks half-assed Italian to Wanda and she gets all worked up.”

He knew French, Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian and Hungarian, and he wooed me with all of them, plus the Cyrillic alphabet. He was modest, though. “The latter two certainly won’t get me into a mermaid’s pants … or pant,” he quipped.

The e-mails passed back and forth almost hourly. “My box has not got this much action in months,” I told him.

I make some tea as our scissors traced curves around that day’s news. He pulls out a silver flask, takes a swig, offers me some. It’s whisky. A day of full vice, I think, recalling the cigarettes puffed on the ride home and the questionable business to be had in my basement.

Finally, we pluck enough paper daisies to cover my push-up and panties. I grab my cheap, iridescent bedspread, and we climb down to the frigid basement. Whipping out the familiar camera, he starts testing for light. The room looks like a tacky, by-the-hour motel: lime sherbet walls, thin standard blue carpet, naked windows and my Pepto-Bismol-on-acid bedspread.

I push two bare mattresses together and cover them in pink. An iPod starts playing a peppy tune. I pull my cherry red tank top over my head, suck in my gut. Next comes my yoga pants, sliding over the panties. I stand before him, feeling far more naked than I really am. I hop onto the bed to hide my skin with arms and crossed legs.

We met through a camera lens. He made me nervous when he took my column’s mug shot, crawling toward me with his black Nikon monstrosity. His face was obscured as he scrunched it behind the viewfinder, and I stared back into its glassy depths. I sweated in my black longsleeves. I knew then I had to find out about the man behind the lens.

I had been hired as the newest sex columnist, and that job was hot property. Another section of the newspaper–the blog–recruited me a month after. And I met my photographer again. We would take up our roles as model and voyeur, it was decided, as a way to introduce the sex columnist to the blog readers. Or, in his words: “Christine, nothing is more important to me than bringing sexy back.”

And that’s when the email tease began, a full week before our next scheduled shoot. We planned to cover my body in newspaper flower cut-outs, a la American Beauty, and take it from there. He asked if I was ready for that sort of intensity.

“‘Intense’ is my middle name,” I wrote. “Actually, my middle name is Renee, which I think might mean ‘intense’ in French.”

“Je suis né avec l’intensité,” he replied. “J’espère qu’il n’y aura pas trop vendredi.”

At the time, I couldn’t understand much French, but he was obviously cultured enough to make my panties wet. And I told him so.

I fucked up someone’s life today by saying, “Hello. How are you?”

And she: “We got a new application.”

And me, putting two and two together, connecting your pseudonymed blog to your face. It was your mistake to think you could get away with open dissent under a fanciful name, my mistake in thinking that outing a rival would be fun, my fault that things all came undone.

And now I don’t know where it’s going, but it’s not looking good. And I would turn to you and say, “I’m sorry.” But still I would remember that glimmer of excitement when I realized it was you, and for a moment I fell in love with you, your crisp, nervous tie and blue button-down and most of all the feeling of danger and realizing you wanted your rival after all.

I wrote this in class today, but I don’t know if I will develop this.

I was born in Hanover, Germany, and I bear its brand on my shoulder. I stand a proud 16 hands 2 inches–that’s 66 inches to you. My coat, sienna with burnt copper flecks in the sun, blankets my dimpled haunches and the muscles of my burly neck. My black legs are not spindly like a Thoroughbred’s or like the tree trunks of Clydesdales, brute enough to pull carriages for watery American beer. Better than squat Quarter Horses, too, with their bulbous drumstick hinds. Warmblood I am, and the most beautiful one at that.

I have no white splotches on my legs–they are pure in their inky tone. Instead, I wear a star on my forehead, a bright diamond buffeted by a hazy border of light. When I’m feeling rakish, I’ll shake my head just so to side sweep my thick forelock across my eye.

And now I strut in California for the latest detestable and ignorant human. She stands, hands clasped and a gaping mouth catching flies, as I trod down the ramp of my cramped trailer. She flits forward, reaching out to poke and prod at my face. I skit around her touch and snort at her impetuousness. She will learn soon that I am not owned. I have my very own passport.

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