Photographer

Alex takes me home with him afterward sometimes and we sit around talking about the other models, about other clients of his, art directors we hate, shop talk really. He's got a good eye, the problem is that for him the camera sees things the way he does, so when he doesn't have a good AD or doesn't like the subject, you can tell by looking at the shot. He finally started bringing his own stylist, taught her photography, really took her under his wing, the daughter of his friends, and it was a couple of years before he admitted to me he'd fucked her, too. But that was later, when we drove up to see her at her new school, Bennington, at the beginning of the fall semester when the students were roaming the campus looking for apples high in the trees, carrying long poles with wide-mouthed cans nailed to the top. You would see them clustered here or there at a trunk,  like one many-legged insect, its long proboscis probing the branches. And she, her fingers were black with pigment. She'd been painting a lot which was good, but what of, and the sheer amount of black alarmed me. Counting backwards as I watch them talk I realize that she had to have been 13 when she started with him and this is sort of when I stop wanting to be friends.

But that hasn't happened yet, right now we're at one end of his nearly empty loft, and he's trying to tell me something about a trip and photos in the woods and...

I can't find the fucking fawn
he snaps as he's tearing through his drawer of slides and he sounds more upset than if there were an actual fawn trapped in the cabinet somewhere.