“No?”
“No, I think it’s an installation. An interactive, multimedia experience with the viewer not just witnessing a conversation but becoming a part of it. I think it’s two parts: an anteroom, with white walls and a series of images—like portraits and still lifes, deconstructed and distorted—that kind of works as a portal into a black-box gallery, a womb, if you will, where the work completely envelops the viewer, with images of faces and body parts and voice recordings. Various subjects sharing their thoughts on beauty in surround sound. So that the viewer feels as if she’spartof the art. She’s in the headspace of someone consuming and being consumed.”
“Mmm,” he says, nuzzling my neck.
“Are you paying attention?”
“Absolutely.”
“I’m serious, Fran. This is important to me.”
“I know, Cile. I’m listening. You want to create two separate physical and mental spaces that work collectively to affect your viewer. So they experience the dichotomy of the consumption viscerally. Yes?”
I’m quiet for a second, cradling my Nikon in my lap. I forget that we speak the same language even when we don’t speak the same language. That it was this process of analyzing and critiquing and conceiving art that brought us together in the first place. Over countless glasses of pastis and Lillet at the café near Philippe’s studio. Over bottles of Bordeaux and watchingÀ bout de souffleon repeat in François’s six-story walk-up. Over winter afternoons strolling through the Fondation Cartier pour l’Art Contemporain, relishing exhibitions like Herb Ritts’s sculptural portraits and the groundbreaking installationEverything That Rises Must Convergeby the artist Sarah Sze, whom I’d known briefly in college. And then returning to my apartment near the Jardin du Luxembourg, to camp beneath the covers with Leelou at our feet and discuss what we had seen, what pieces moved us, and why.
This was how we fell in love.
“Yes,” I say eventually. “That is what I want to do.”
“I think it sounds great, Cile. I love the idea of you doing something more conceptual than traditional.”
He pauses for a second, inhaling deeply. The scent of frangipani surrounds us. Soft, sweet, sexy. Green.
“I think you should shoot Anouk,” he says, taking me by surprise.
I had somehow managed not to tell him. Since Élodie, I no longer told him everything.
For a moment, I pause, weighing the repercussions, and then, “I have. I did.”
He stills beneath me, his hand ceasing to move in my hair. “You did? When? You weren’t going to tell me? How did it go?”
“Good. We did it a couple of months ago. At her place. Black and whites. Natural light. Very intimate, vulnerable.”
“And you didn’t tell me?”
“You’ve been a little busy, François.”
“I talk to you every day. You shoot an icon, your former crush, and you forget to mention it?”
I shrug. Saying more, I fear, will give it all away. And in the moment, I am relieved that in our current position—his body half beneath mine, my face turned up to the sky—he is unable to read my expression.
“Did she bring up the assault?”
It throws me. That he remembers.
“What? No. Why—? Why would she bring it up?”
“Because. This idea of beauty consuming you. I thought maybe she brought it up. In her line of work, it’s more common than you think. It probably happens a lot.”
His words are jarring. Not because I’d never considered the inherent risk of sexual assault in the modeling profession, but because when Anouk first alluded to the possibility of one’s beauty being the cause of consumption, I never imagined that’s what she was referencing.
That first afternoon in her dressing room—when I’d showed up unannounced with a thank-you card and a yoga towel—I’d explained I was wrestling with beauty and our consumption of it, and she’d said, with little hesitation, “Or maybe its consumption of us.”
I’d interpreted her meaning as something abstract. The idea that we as a civilization could be destroyed in our quest for beauty. Jane’srevelation had intimated that the destruction was more personal. But maybe that hadn’t been Anouk’s take all along. Maybe the very thing that had made her revered made her prey.
“She hasn’t brought it up,” I say.
“Maybe she’s blocked it.”
