I bet you look just tremendous naked, don’t you?
This from Alan Belk, the Welsh post-doc who’d this semester fallen into the habit of spending every noon hour in Meg’s office.
She sucked the plastic spoon with which she’d just finished her yogurt. Thinking he was getting pretty bold. Deciding how big a bone to throw him.
Actually, yes, she said. Outside of a knee-surgery scar, I do, in fact, look pretty tremendous naked.
Oh my God.
He was thirty pounds overweight, smelled of cigarette smoke, mild B.O. But there was something to him. There was something to him. The charm of the utterly unrepressed. Plus which he got a good bit of mileage out of the accent. Just two days earlier she’d overheard a sophomore in the Humanities Center telling her friend something really rather remarkably debauched she wanted to do to him. If he spoke like a Philadelphian there’d be none of that.
I’d so love to photograph you, he said.
I bet you would.
Naked, he said.
She smiled. That's what I figured you meant.
I’m serious. How can you be working on a book on pornography and not on some level want to be photographed naked?
Who says I haven’t been?
I don’t mean by your bloody husband. There’s nothing pornographic in that.
She tapped the spoon on the edge of the yogurt cup, looking out the window over his shoulder. The trees were budding. Birds and bees.
Dear God, he finally said. It was your husband, wasn’t it?
