My Body(47)

I well remember the day you describe. I had just dropped out of college and hadn’t yet found a new place to live in Los Angeles, so I drove two and a half hours from San Diego to come and meet you. It was a Saturday. I’d already been in Los Angeles twice that week, shooting the regular catalog jobs that paid my bills. I didn’t feel like making the commute again, but I understood that it was important for me to try and build my portfolio with more “tears,” the pages taken from magazine editorials. I left early in the morning, drinking coffee and blasting talk radio to help me stay awake on the highway. When I arrived, the marine layer still hadn’t burned off yet.

I drove back and forth on La Brea in front of your photo studio, searching for parking. I was so worried about being late and seeming unprofessional that I eventually pulled into the McDonald’s lot next door and parked, praying I wouldn’t get a ticket or be towed, neither of which I could afford at the time. I put on the heels I’d thrown in the backseat and grabbed my book of modeling pictures. My agent had told me to wear no makeup, but as I checked my reflection in the rearview mirror, I sneaked a tiny bit of concealer under my eyes. I wanted to appear fresh and naturally beautiful to you.

You described me as “scruffy” to the Sun in 2017:

She came in wearing a black baggy smock dress with horrible four inch black plastic shoes on. It was like a bin liner and hid everything. She was sat waiting to see Tony Duran, the photographer, and he told me to send her home.



You say that you started talking to me “for some weird reason,” but our conversation was no accident. Although you were nearly fifty, about thirty years my senior, I read you in an instant. I knew what I needed to do; I’ve had to impress men like you my entire life and be grateful for any scrap of attention. I was still a teenager, but knowing how to get noticed by people in your position was already second nature. I approached you, played it cool, and complimented you on your massive Blow-Up poster.

“I love that film,” I said. It was true. I’d been introduced to it at the summer arts program I’d done in San Francisco in my junior year of high school, when I was smoking pot and sitting around my dorm room, toying with the idea of becoming an artist, someone who might make a movie one day rather than get naked in one. My professor had shown us Blow-Up for the filmmaking, but I’d been struck by the women in the film; by their beauty and desirability and glamour. Their desperation to be seen through the lens of the blasé photographer made perfect sense to me. I had the same poster, albeit smaller, waiting to be framed and hung whenever I found a place to live.

“Really?” you asked in your British accent, as you turned to face me.

Men never notice the overcalculating that women do. They think things happen “for some weird reason” while women sing songs and do backbends and dance elaborate moves to make those things happen.

You started talking about your career. You told me you used to shoot for Playboy and that your new magazine, while full of nude girls, was “nothing like it.”

You got excited when I said I’d been an art major. How surprising it must have been for you to discover that I was, to use your words, “actually a really smart girl.” A mere mention of a pretentious film—it was so easy to subvert your expectations.

I wonder how many women you’ve disregarded in your life, written off, because you assumed they had nothing to offer beyond the way they looked. How quickly they learned that the stuff in their heads was of less value than the shape of their bodies. I bet they were all smarter than you.

You took out heavy, oversized books of vintage erotic photographs. You said they were the inspiration for your magazine. Maybe you were insecure about being a cheesy Playboy photographer, a Hugh Hefner wannabe, so you jumped to prove you were an artist after I mentioned that my father was a painter. Or maybe you were just testing me, seeing whether I really understood the references I made. I pointed to the pictures I liked, oohing and aahing over the squeaky, glossy pages.

I must have said something right, because you peered up at me from the splayed pages of a Helmut Newton book and paused to consider me, as if you really saw me for the first time. That was when you asked me to strip.

“Why don’t you take your clothes off and put a little pair of knickers on?” You indicated the bathroom.

I acted nonchalant. “Oh, okay, sure,” you remember me saying. Our memories align there. But what you couldn’t know is how deeply satisfied I was. I was glad that our interaction had led to you wanting more from me, happy that my commute might not have been in vain.

I suppose that, from your perspective, this should be the moment I thank you for. When I was younger, I would have thought so, too. You looked past my unappealing outfit and cheap shoes and figured why not, she’s not bad to talk to, let’s give her a shot, see what she’s working with.

Besides, some part of me figured, I love being naked, who the fuck cares. I’d just started to learn that actually, everyone seemed to really, really care. I was beginning to understand that I could use this attention to my advantage. I wanted to test the waters: What is the power of my body? Is it ever my power?

When I came out of the bathroom topless, I stood up straight, not covering my breasts. I believed that by taking off my clothes proudly, by not letting myself be embarrassed by my nakedness, I might somehow intimidate you, shifting the dynamic. But of course there was no chance of that, when we live in a world where millions of women will jump at the chance to win the attention of men like you, Steve.