“This is called photo linen,” he explained. “You can print pictures on it. See this? I made it in the darkroom in the art building.”
He held up an eight-by-ten photograph of Mick Jagger, his rubber pout larger than life.
“It’s a silk-screening process, à la Warhol. Wouldn’t it be fun to wear a shirt with Mick on it?”
Jimmy said, “That would be even better than the designs on your jumpsuit.”
“The Beatles,” Ann said. “Or T. S. Eliot.”
“Sheets and Kelly!” said Jimmy.
“You could wear your own picture,” Ann said.
They were laughing. She imagined Yvor Winters wearing his own photo. Or Emily Dickinson’s.
“A million possibilities,” Chip said. “You can sew, can’t you, Ann? We could make a sample and offer it to a big company.”
“This material is too stiff. It’s for tents. How could you wear it?”
“This will just be a prototype,” Chip said. “Science will follow.”
He left the roll of photo linen and biked off to class. He hadn’t mentioned Pixie or his jumpsuit.
ANN LIKED SHOWERING at Jimmy’s. His bathroom was bright white, not the gloomy color of stale blood. When she emerged and grabbed an extra towel for her hair, Jimmy was standing in the doorway with his camera.
“I want to photograph you,” Jimmy said in a quiet tone that sounded almost worried.
“Like this?”
“I like the way you look, just coming out of the shower. I want to photograph you like this—clean, pure. But we should go outside.”
“Outside?” She toweled a thigh.
“No one can see back there, with all the trees. I go out and pee there all the time. There’s a fence.”
She rubbed her hair with the towel. “My mama told me never to go outside with a wet head.”
He doubled over laughing, as though he were suddenly naked, trying to hide his dog toys, or whatever he wanted to call his things.
They stayed indoors. Posing for photographs was easier than standing stock-still and stark naked for a drawing. She thought her hair looked good. She was growing it long and straight, so she didn’t need brush rollers. Jimmy had waited while she fixed it. She wouldn’t have wanted to be photographed with stringy hair.
Jimmy complained about her makeup—powder to reduce shine and liner to accentuate her eyes. Artificial, he said.
“You don’t need lipstick,” he said, jabbing his finger at her mouth. “It’s not natural.”
When Jimmy began aiming his camera she stuck her tongue out at him. She made faces. She marched around like a wooden soldier. She did deep lunges and pirouettes. She balanced Shakespeare’s tragedies on her head.
Jimmy said. “That’s good.”
“I’ve got good balance.”
She clowned in the buff while Jimmy clicked his camera. He had a way with it, she thought, admiring his quick moves. He was adept with his hands. He was meticulous and delicate. Click-click-click. His hands were graceful but strong. She thought about her father’s hands—rough and hardened. She had seen him dehorn a cow.
BESIDES PHOTOGRAPHS, JIMMY was experimenting with tape loops, making a sound collage of forties radio comedies and bubblegum rock tunes. Everyone seemed to be making things—and using the word authentic. Ceramic pots, furniture, clothing. The Twiggy girl was making bird sculptures out of thin wire. Ann tried making a collage from magazine illustrations. She realized she had a phallic theme in the display—lipsticks, rockets, bombs—all pointing away from the spiraling center of an oxeye daisy.
LATER IN THE week, Jimmy brought his photographs to show her. He had printed four of them on photo linen and displayed them on her worktable. They were grainy. She was pleased, because her figure showed to advantage, and her pubic hair was light, not bushy. Her breasts were suggestive shapes. The photos seemed almost like drawings.
“I like that they’re not literal,” he said, tracing the lines. “Do you think they’re artistic?”
“Yes, very.” She was rather thrilled, thinking of some nude drawings by French artists she had seen in an art museum in San Francisco.
Jimmy teased her about wearing one of the photos in public.
“You could put them on a skirt—the front view on the front and the back view on the back.”
“Or vice versa? Then I could twirl.”
She was remembering the sign at the protest rally on White Plaza. It showed different messages on the front and back.
“You wouldn’t really do this,” he said.
“In the Quad, maybe. But not at the pancake place, for instance.”
Of course she wouldn’t, but it was silly fun to imagine. The shock, the utter abandonment of self-consciousness. She pictured herself in a scene in a French movie.
She excavated a dress from her closet—a plain black sheath that she had worn to a cocktail party senior year. Because her mother had made it, it had survived her Salvation Army purge. Now she showed Jimmy how the photos would fit. She basted them onto the dress and then modeled it while he snapped pictures of her.
He folded a copy of the Oracle for her to use as a fan. It rattled and flapped clumsily as she tried to wave it provocatively.
She said, “Artists in the twenties would have done this. Zelda.”
They laughed and laughed, holding each other. They might have been stoned, but they weren’t. She felt so reckless. She didn’t know what she would do next. What she would do for Jimmy. She glimpsed the familiar mole on her breast in one of the photographs. What was happening to her?
Over the years, she has been filled with questions about the photo dress, most of them beginning with why. She has, shockingly, imagined it as a wedding dress.
AT JIMMY’S, THEY made omelets and opened a can of tomato soup and ate on his couch with the stereo playing Peer Gynt. During “The Hall of the Mountain King,” Jimmy said, “I was thinking—you’re always typing and typing. And you leaped at the chance to model for ten dollars an hour.”
“Ha. One hour. Then I got cold feet.”
Jimmy suggested that instead of typing, she could earn money making photo shirts.
“People wouldn’t have to be in their birthday suits! You’d be making something with your hands. Like that macramé stuff you did.”
But Ann didn’t want to sew. It was women’s work. So was typing, but she liked that better.
“You know I don’t want anyone else to see your picture on that dress,” he said.
“No, it’s for you. It’s just something between us.”
Jimmy finished his omelet and set the plate on the coffee table, a red octagonal stop sign, a curb discard he had salvaged and screwed legs on. The trolls and gnomes had finished their wild dance and now were creeping through the Mountain King’s castle. At least that was what Ann pictured. She was roaming through Jimmy’s Newsweek and Ramparts magazines. She admired his bookshelves made from concrete blocks and raw pine planks.
“Where did you get concrete blocks?” she asked.
“That builders’ supply place out on El Camino.”
She fingered the rough texture of one of the blocks. “I can’t get over how simple it is.” It wouldn’t have occurred to Ann to stack up some scraps of wood and blocks. “Authentic,” she said, testing the word.