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By Root 1212 0

now, a woman reduced to a perfect miniature of herself, every fact of her cast by light onto a mirror. The ocean wind, warm and damp, moved in his hair, and Howard’s hands, with their long fingers and trim nails, moved quickly as he sketched her, fixing her image on the page. She remembered the sand shifting beneath her hips as she posed for David’s camera, and how they had talked about her later, David and Howard, not as a flesh-and-blood woman in the room but rather as an image, a form. Remembering this, her body seemed fragile suddenly, as if she were not the accomplished self-sufficient woman who’d taken a group to China and back but rather someone who might be swept away by the next gust of wind. Then she remembered Howard’s hand, warming her pocket and her flesh. That hand, the one moving now, the one that drew her.

She reached down to her waist and caught the hem of her blouse. Slowly, but without hesitation, she pulled it over her head and let it fall on the sand. On the porch, Howard stopped drawing, though he did not lift his head. The small muscles in his arms and shoulders had ceased moving. Norah unzipped her shorts. They slid down over her hips and she stepped out of them. So far it was nothing unfamiliar, just the same swimsuit she had modeled in so many times before. But now she reached behind and unhooked the straps of the top. She pushed the bottoms over her hips and down her legs, kicking them away. She stood feeling the sun and wind move across her skin.

Howard slowly raised his head from the camera obscura and sat staring.

For an instant it had a nightmare quality, that sense of panic and shame when she realized, in the middle of a dream, shopping or walking in a crowded park, that she had forgotten to get dressed. She started to reach for her suit.

“No, don’t,” Howard whispered, and she paused, straightening. “You’re so beautiful.” He rose then, carefully, slowly, as if she were a bird he might startle into flight. But Norah stood very still, intently present in her body, feeling as if she were made out of sand, sand meeting fire and about to be transformed, smoothed, made glittering. Howard crossed the few feet of beach. It seemed to take him forever, his feet sinking into the warm sand. When he finally reached her he stopped, without touching her, and stared. The wind moved in her hair and he pushed a strand from her lip, tucking it, very gently, behind her ear.

“I could never capture this,” he said, “what you are in this moment. I could never capture it.”

Norah smiled and splayed her hand flat on his chest, feeling the thin madras cotton and the warm flesh, the layers of muscle, bone. The sternum, she remembered, from the days when she had studied bones in order to better understand David and his work. The manubrium and the gladiolus, shaped like a sword. The true ribs and the false, the lines of union.

He cupped his hands lightly around her face. She let her own hand fall. Together, without speaking, they walked to the little cottage. She left her clothes on the sand; she did not care about that either, that anyone might see them. The boards of the porch gave slightly beneath her feet. The cloth over the camera obscura was thrown back and she saw with satisfaction that Howard had sketched the beach and horizon, the scattered rocks and trees; all these were perfect reproductions. He had sketched her hair, a soft cloud, amorphous, but that was all. Where she had stood the page was blank. Her clothes had fallen like leaves, and he had looked up to see her standing there.

For once, it was she who had stopped time.

The room seemed dim after the light of the beach, and the world was framed in the window as it had been in the lens of the camera obscura, so bright and vivid that it brought tears to her eyes. She sat on the edge of the bed. Lie down, he said, pulling his shirt over his head. I just want to look at you for a moment. She did, and he stood over her, his eyes moving across her skin. Stay with me, he said, and he shocked her by kneeling and resting his head on her belly, his unshaven