All Days Are Night Read Online Free PDF

a painting, ballet dancers. Now you could see the studio, a white room, or rather a white wall, with Gillian in the background seeming to float in white. The camera zoomed up to her at breakneck speed. She switched over to Play, and when the camera was very near, she froze the frame. There was her old face, wide staring eyes, mouth open in welcome. Gillian pressed a button, leapt forward from frame to frame. Her mouth closed and opened, but the expression in the eyes didn’t change.
    She never felt nervous before the programs and was surprised now by the look of fear in her eyes. It was as though the face could already sense its destruction ahead. An unexpected noise, a reflection, a sudden memory changed the expression, for a split second the cameras created a person there had never been before and who would never exist again. Twenty-five frames a second, twenty-five people who didn’t have much more in common than their physical details, hair and eye color, height and weight. It was only the linking of the pictures that created the fuzziness that constituted a human being.
    She pressed Play and lay on her back. She heard her voice, promising young talent, first one-person show, return to figurativeness. Gillian turned her head to the screen and saw herself announcing a film clip. Turned through ninety degrees her face looked thinner and younger. It looked unfamiliar, perhaps that was why she saw each individual feature with greater clarity, the lips, the dimple in the chin, the nose and eyes. She thought of Tania, who had never managed to make her up without passing some remark about her appearance, her heavy eyebrows, her thin lips, or her complexion. Her problem zones, she liked to say.
    The woman on the television stopped talking, and her face looked tense for a moment that to Gillian seemed unending. At last the film began. The camera swung through an exhibition room, you saw life-size naked women washing themselves, getting dressed or undressed or doing chores. Although the poses were everyday, they seemed somehow classic. Then there was a close-up of Hubert’s face, and his name was flashed up on-screen,Hubert Amrhein, and in brackets his age, thirty-nine, the same as hers. He talked about his work, about how he found his models on the street, professionals didn’t interest him. Ordinary women, he said. They get undressed, I photograph them. It all has to happen right away, on impulse, there are no prior agreements, no second chances. The hunt for models was a large part of the artistic process, he said. Of a hundred women he spoke to, maybe one or two agreed. Of ten whose photographs he took, he might paint two or three, often months later, long after he had forgotten their names. While he spoke, some of the pictures were faded in. The editor’s questions were cut out, all you heard was Hubert’s voice, always beginning again, riffing and spieling. He didn’t really know how he came to choose his models, sometimes he thought they chose him. It wasn’t primarily beauty that interested him but intensity, power, and pleasure, also lostness, aggression, fear. It was like when you fell in love with someone. Usually you couldn’t explain that either. His smile looked at once shy and conceited. Perhaps that went into the pictures, desire and the impossibility of fulfillment.
    Jerk, thought Gillian. Now there was a street scene, passersby in a pedestrian neighborhood, filmed from a slight degree of elevation. The camera fixed on a woman and followed her through the crowd, a good-looking young employee or businesswoman in a boring suit. Gillian tried to picture her naked, but she couldn’t do it. Sometimes he would imagine one of his models happening to see the picture of herself, Hubert said. She was strolling through the city, stopped in front of the window of a gallery, and saw herself naked in her apartment, washing the dishesor vacuuming. I think she would probably recognize her kitchen fixtures before herself,