OFTEN, LATE AT night, the couple next door began jiggling their bed frame, knocking it against the thin wall, grunting and sighing with it. She listened, wondering how married couples could sit and read before bed. How could they wait? The sounds made her grumpy. Ann had never really had a boyfriend—a relationship, that is, the term in vogue. Although she wasn’t without sexual dalliances, nobody she had ever cared about had said “I love you” or given her a gift. She had been lovelorn throughout college over a certain Thomas from her sophomore art history class and had not gone steady with anyone since. In the mornings, when she heard the couple next door, their shower was like the sound of time whizzing by.
Wanted: Natural, attractive women to model for professional photos in specialty magazines. $10 an hour. No experience necessary.
It was in the neighborhood, on Stanford Avenue, a short drive. Ann was not beautiful, but she thought she was pretty, and she was slim with fairly good legs. Ten dollars—an outlandish amount—would buy some curtain material, she thought.
She entered a rental room in a plain white house set back from the street. A camera on a tripod faced a rolled-out screen. The man, who was short and thin, showed her several display folders of his work. His photos were not lewd. The models were ordinary people. In bathing suits some of them appeared almost grotesque, not glamorous as one would expect from models. One folder contained heavy middle-aged women wrestlers.
He asked her to pirouette so he could get a good look at her.
“I think I can use you,” he said. “What size are you?”
He flicked ash into a small ashtray crammed with cigarette butts and handed her a shoebox from a stack on the floor. He rummaged through a pile of shortie pajamas on the bed.
“Could you pose in these?”
In an unadorned white bathroom, she changed into the pale pink baby-doll pajamas. She kept her underwear on. She remembered seeing pictures of movie stars posing in baby-dolls, so she thought it was all right. She left her black slim-jims and green Ban-lon sweater on a hook on the bathroom door and emerged awkwardly, the red high heels catching on the carpet.
“What do you do with the pictures?” she asked.
“I work with several magazines. Freelance.”
She wondered how she could stand around in high heels for an hour. Still, ten dollars was stupendous pay for one hour. She had earned seventy-five cents an hour when she worked one summer at a dress shop.
He placed her in front of the blank screen. Preoccupied with getting the shot right, he hardly spoke. The cigarette dangled from the corner of his mouth while he adjusted his tripod and his camera settings. His rigging seemed professional enough, she thought, not that she would know. The room was small, with just a bed, a desk, and a tiny kitchenette. Two shabby duffel bags were squeezed into a space between the bed and the closet.
He spoke vaguely of traveling around. He once worked in a zoo and before that in a photo lab with the famous Hotshot Hansen, whoever that was. In Blow-Up, David Hemmings had a nice pad and lived the high life.
“That’s good,” the photographer said, after shooting several photos. “Anybody ever tell you you look like Natalie Wood?”
“No.”
“Well, you do.”
“Really? She’s pretty.”
“Could you change into this outfit?”
More baby dolls, a different color, a different cut—cheap, not nice like she would wear. She changed, and when she came out of the bathroom, he went in.
She waited, wishing she could get dressed and be gone, but her clothes were in the bathroom. And she had committed herself to earning ten dollars.
He emerged finally. The water gurgled. He shut the door.
“Now where were we?” he said.
He fiddled with his camera, then lifted it from the tripod. He asked her to move along an imaginary line while he shot pictures rapidly. He had her raise her arms as though she were holding a volleyball. “Pout,” he said. “Do a rosebud with your mouth.”
“How much longer will this take?”
“Almost finished, babe.”
Babe. She pouted a rosebud.
“Hold still. There! That’s a good one.”
When she returned to the bathroom to get dressed, she peered out the window at a playground. A quartet of small girls was seesawing behind a school. As she dressed, she realized that her slim-jims were slightly damp. The room was stifling. His shaving kit was on the windowsill. The seesawing girls still went up and down. Ann saw her face in the mirror. Caption: Chick from Sticks in over Head.
He removed his billfold from his hip pocket and peeled out a ten.
“As promised.”
She snatched the bill and hurtled into the sunshine. She sped home and into the gloomy shower. She should have been reading Humphry Clinker.
ANN GLIDED IN shadow through the cool arcades alongside the Main Quad, out of the sun. She had forgotten her sunglasses. She wore low heels, a dark flared skirt, and a blue cotton blouse with a Macmillan collar. She had ironed the blouse without scorching it. It was cold in the daytime in Palo Alto, and she wore a wool cardigan. From her large leather handbag with double handles, attached by small brass horseshoes, her Emily Dickinson paperback rose upright, the name visible.
Ann almost bumped into Yvor Winters as he turned to enter his corner office. She recognized him from the photograph on his book jacket. She fled upstairs to the restroom, where she waited until the precise time of her appointment. She combed her hair and freshened her lipstick—Persian melon. It was really too orange for her, she thought. She tucked in her blouse.
“Come in, come in,” he said, not lifting his eyes from a paper he was reading.
She waited until he motioned her to the chair facing his desk.
He was a round man in a donkey-gray suit, his wire-rimmed glasses like owl eyes. He appeared to be ill, his face saggy and pale.
“Welcome to the graduate program,” he said, without emphasis. His voice was low and somber. “What are your plans with us here?”
“Well, I’m here to study toward the PhD.” She was self-conscious about her accent.
“That goes without saying.” He made a dismissive gesture, as if he were swishing off a fly. “Why? What are your research interests?”
“I love to read,” she said, with a strong effort at perkiness. “I’m tackling the long list.”
“The canon and then some,” he said, as if making a joke. An off rhyme? He tapped his pencil and fumbled through some papers.
“I see from your transcript here that you are lacking in early studies. You’ll need to take Old English. Can’t get away from that. It won’t include Beowulf. You’ll need that too. And you should start out with the poetics course. That’s a good range of theory.”
“I want to take your modern poetry seminar.”
“Better sign up now. There won’t be space.”
He shuffled through some papers and marked something she thought was a sign-up sheet for the seminar.
“Take these to registration,” he said, shoving two cards into her hand.
“What poets are you reading now?” he asked abruptly.
She nudged Emily Dickinson forward. “I might like to write my dissertation on her,” she said. A mouse talking. She straightened up.