Pausing only long enough to verify that the humped rock formation in the photographs of Rebecca on the cliff was in fact the same as the formation on the cliff she had leapt from in Jamaica Wind, Coltrane hurriedly set aside the boxes he had previously looked at. Each night when he had responded helplessly to the urge to come down here, he had been eager to sort through the entire collection but had never gotten past three of the boxes. To have rushed through such an abundance of beauty would have been gluttony.
But now rushing was exactly what Coltrane did, opening box after box, sorting through their contents as quickly as he could without risking damage to the images. The late hour and the glare of the overhead lights made his head pound. His hands trembled with apprehension that he was wrong, with anticipation that he was right. His emotions twisted and tugged. Five boxes. Eight. Twelve. Their contents occupied shelf after shelf. Photographs of Rebecca Chance on horseback, on a sailboat, on a diving board, a forest path, a garden terrace, a stone staircase, a sun-bathed balcony. Fifteen. Eighteen. Of Rebecca Chance in evening clothes, in slacks and a blouse, in jodhpurs, a swimming suit, a gardening dress, a flower-patterned skirt, a white top, and an even whiter shawl.
The full impact of the amount of photographs that Packard had taken of Rebecca Chance was stunning. These many pictures – no wonder Packard hadn’t produced many new photographs. He wouldn’t have had the opportunity. Developing so many photographs (and Packard always developed his own work) would have taken a lifetime.
Although Coltrane was fervently convinced that his logic was correct, his hands trembled with despondency as he reached the final box and fumbled to lift its lid, expecting disappointment. As a consequence, he wasn’t prepared. The first nude photograph rendered him powerless. His legs became rigid. His body turned to stone. His breathing stopped.
The most arousing photograph he had ever seen showed Rebecca Chance naked and yet covered, draped with the chromium beads that hung on the walls of the dining room upstairs. She leaned with her customary natural grace against the blackness of the wall beyond the beads. She was angled slightly to the left, her head and body almost in profile but not quite, both of her eyes visible, directed unashamedly toward the camera. Light came from the left, contributing a sheen to her lush black hair, making her dusky skin seem to glow and her dark eyes seem to have something burning within them. At the same time, the light reflected off the strings of chromium beads, causing them to gleam with the simultaneous evocation of ice and fire. The image had so tactile an illusion that Coltrane could feel those cold/hot beads on his own skin. They seemed to caress him, all the while promising to move and expose more of Rebecca Chance’s magnificent body, the gleaming beads contrasting with the large dark nipples that projected from among them, as well as with the even darker silken pubic hair past which they dangled.
Coltrane’s penis hardened. The unwilled motion broke his paralysis, causing strength to return to his legs. His hands, frozen in the act of setting the box’s lid to the side, resumed their activity, trembling as he placed the lid on the shelf. His breath returned, air coursing into him, filling his lungs, reducing the light-headedness that had increasingly overtaken him while he stared at the picture. But his dizziness was only partially abated, for he felt he was falling into the photograph.
His erection became harder. Conscious of his body as much as he was of hers, he thought, I was right. Stieglitz had shown the way. Of the hundreds of photographs that Stieglitz had taken of Georgia O’Keeffe, an astonishing number of them were the most meticulous, loving nude shots that any man had ever taken of any woman. Sometimes it seemed that Stieglitz had commemorated every inch of O’Keeffe’s body, her expressive hands, yes, and her breasts and her eyes, but also her elbows and knees, the cleft in her hips and the soles of her feet, the curve of her shoulder blades, parts of her that, to Coltrane’s knowledge, had never been the subject of a close-up portrait but that Stieglitz’s amazingly intimate photographs evoked. One critic had been almost frightened by the power of Stieglitz’s portraits of O’Keeffe, describing them as primal, implying that Stieglitz thought of O’Keeffe as the great Earth Mother.
But in Packard’s naked depiction of Rebecca Chance, she wasn’t the mother but the lover of us all, Coltrane thought. Overwhelmed, he turned to the other photographs in the box, finding more nude portraits, each more candid and beautiful than the one before. None was as artistically staged as the one he had first seen, but each was a work of art because Rebecca Chance was a work of art. Her unclothed body, its smooth curves, indentations, and ridges, was mysterious, at the same time daunting, so powerful in its frank presentation of sexual womanhood that it caused Coltrane to react not only with desire but also with awe. Rebecca Chance didn’t pose so much as present herself before the camera, allowing herself to be photographed. Gazing unabashedly into the lens, she was so at home with her female nature that Coltrane had to fight feeling embarrassed about his sexual reaction to her.
He examined more photographs and came to a remarkable sequence in which Packard had done what Stieglitz only hinted at with Georgia O’Keeffe, photographing literally every inch of Rebecca Chance’s body, her ears, the top of her head, the nape of her neck, the area beneath her arms, the inside of her thighs, the backs of her knees. There was no area so commonplace or private that Packard had not taken a picture of in close-up. What made the sequence so moving was the devotion with which Packard had recorded the separate parts of the object of his obsession, as if in the thoroughness of his subdivision of her he could multiply her beauty.
Coltrane reached the last of the nude photographs and felt emotionally exhausted. Bracing himself against a shelf, he closed his eyes, inhaled deeply, and mustered the energy to begin putting all the photographs back into their boxes. His hands felt numb. His heart pounded. Despite his closed eyes, he continued to see Rebecca Chance, naked, gazing at him. Raising his eyelids, he took one more look at the final nude photograph before him, then managed to put all of them away.
Upstairs, on the sleeping bag next to the increasingly pathetic-looking artificial Christmas tree in the living room, Coltrane fell into a black doze almost immediately. On previous nights, Ilkovic had haunted his dreams, turning them into nightmares, but tonight, it was Rebecca Chance’s arms that reached for him, her naked body pressing against him.
2
“CAREFUL,” the paunchy foreman told the two young men who were working with him. They all wore blue shirts that had the same logo as was on the side of the blue semitruck: PACIFIC MOVERS. They opened the back of the truck, the right and left hatches slamming against each side. After securing the hatches, they pulled out a ramp from a slot beneath the truck, the ramp making a scraping sound that grated against Coltrane’s nerves. While the workers hooked the ramp into place, Coltrane walked toward the open rear and saw stacks of furniture hidden by generous amounts of protective blankets.
“Careful,” the paunchy foreman repeated, and now Coltrane realized that the man was talking to him, not his young coworkers. “You’d better stay out of the way. Sometimes stuff falls, or one of these guys might trip.”
“I hope not.”
“The last thing we want is a client to get hurt.”
“I’m not worried about me. Don’t let anything happen to the furniture.”
“No problem there. I’ve been doing this for twenty years.”