Sometime later, Didier had reconfigured his subjects: Anouk on her back. Bas above her, lying between her legs, kissing the side of her face. The camera close on their profiles. So close you could read the beads of sweat on her neck, grains of sand caressing his jawline. That kind of texture, Cecilia thought, made a photograph come to life, the moment tangible. Like a Peter Lindbergh. Or a Herb Ritts. Like poetry.
“You can put your hands up by her face? By her chin. Beautiful, yes. Anouk, arch your back. This neck you have isincroyable. Like a dancer. You dance?” Didier was lying in the sand, perpendicular to the twosome. He’d paused to hand his glasses off to Cecilia, who went about cleaning them with her one good hand.
“I used to,” Anouk said.
“Why did you stop?”
“I stopped loving it.”
In her gut, Cecilia had known Anouk was a dancer. Her grace, her carriage, her posture. The long, lean muscles in her calves, her thighs. Cecilia had dreamed of being a ballerina, but at the age of eleven, she already had breasts and a belly, when her fellow classmates did not. And it was just another way that she stood out from the sea of white girls in pink. So she quit. However, by the time she was nineteen, she’d made a vow to herself that if she ever had a daughter, she would do everything in her power to encourage her to do ballet. Breasts and belly be damned.
“Do you love modeling?” Didier asked Anouk now.
“I like it a lot.”
“You could be really good. You just have to work. Be disciplined. Dedicated. You could be a star. I don’t say this to everyone.”
Anouk nodded.
“Alors,” Didier continued, taking his glasses from Cecilia. “We make art. Bas, you can put your finger against her lips. Yes, like this… Beautiful… You can put them in her mouth?”
Bas paused for a second, rolling the thought over in his head. “In her mouth?”
“Yes.”
“Likeinsideof her mouth? Like I’m gagging her? Like I’m choking her?”
“No. Not in her throat. In her mouth, the front of her mouth. Like sexy. Like you are kissing her and at the same time you have your fingers in her mouth.”
For a moment, Bas was silent. And then, “I’m sorry, I don’t see… I’m not sure what it is you want.”
“Ah,putain.” Didier rose up off of the sand and crawled over to where Bas and Anouk were positioned. And then Cecilia and the others watched as he shifted his camera into his left hand and thrust the three center fingers of his right hand into Anouk’s mouth. They were not, as Didier had declared, inserted deeply enough to gag her. But they were introduced so recklessly and callously that Anouk recoiled, reflexively yanking her head back. A look of shock and disbelief washing over her delicate features. And then just as quickly, she regained her composure, setting her jaw, and fighting back whatever emotion was brewing just below the surface. And as if considering Didier’s earlier advice, she acquiesced, arching her back, and parting her lips. Allowing Bas’s long fingers to enter her mouth, while he kissed her neck.
No one on the crew said anything. No one.
Cecilia knew the photo, stylized in black and white, would be beautiful. But the moment was horrid.
For the final shot, just before magic hour, Anouk had changed into a navy two-piece with a bandeau top. They’d wrapped both Bas and Elliot, and after touching up Anouk’s makeup, Sarah had returned to base camp to cleanse and steam the boys’ faces, leaving a small kit with Santiago to handle any beauty emergencies. Didier wanted Anouk asclose to natural as possible. Hair windswept, cheeks flushed. He’d positioned her at the shoreline, lying supine on the sand, and shot her upside down from the ladder above. Marc supporting the ladder’s legs, Cecilia angling the reflector. Anouk’s face tipped up and back toward the camera. Her head at the bottom of the frame. Her torso twisted, her arms outstretched over her head.
At a point when Didier paused to check his f-stop, she caught Cecilia’s gaze and held it. A look so intense Cecilia could not tear herself away. Even as she felt her face flushing and her pulse thudding in her temples. Bas’s hand sliding between Anouk’s legs and his fingers in her mouth and every moment from the night before playing over in Cecilia’s head. Like a silent-film reel. Like porn.
“I want you to take off the top, okay. You cross your arms in front of your chest, like this, we don’t see anything. Like the video Herb did with Helena. Incredibly sexy, but we don’t really see anything. This video make her a star. Even the guy… I don’t remember his name.”
“Chris Isaak,” Marc volunteered.
“Yes, this guy. No one cares about him before. But now everyone knows this video, because it’s so sexy.”
“Some of us cared about him,” Marc muttered.
“Okay, yes, Marc is in the fan club for this guy. But the rest of us hear the song and think of Helena in the underwear on the beach.”
Santiago chuckled.
Beatriz glanced at her Rolex and then the horizon to gauge the remaining minutes of light. “I’ll get your robe, Anouk. It’s up at base camp. You guys start without me.”
Cecilia lowered the reflector so that it was covering her face. She did not want to see Anouk have to make this decision. And she did not want Anouk to see her. To read her thoughts. Knowing that it was Cecilia’s boss who’d put Anouk in this position and that Cecilia did not have the power or the backbone to speak up.
Didier had shot dozens of models topless or nude during the time that Cecilia had worked with him. Most were clearly comfortable with the arrangement, others only slightly less so. Cecilia had never seen him force a model to do something against her will. But to Cecilia, those models were just hired talent, a necessary component in creating an image. To Cecilia, Anouk was different.
