All Days Are Night Read Online Free PDF Page B

he said. The photos are the work of seconds. They capture the secret life of our bodies while we’re busy with something.
    The final shot of the report was one of Hubert’s paintings that showed a heavyset fortyish woman washing her foot in a sink. She was standing on one leg, the other was up. With one hand she was holding her ankle, with the other she was washing her foot. The fingers and toes were interlaced in a complicated way. Although the pose looked demanding, the woman seemed introverted, almost meditative.
    Then they were back in the studio. Gillian and Hubert were facing each other for the interview. She had a few questions from her editor that she had written on index cards. She asked him about working with models, whether he gave them instructions or not. The movements need to be their own, said Hubert, that’s actually not all that easy to achieve. I tell a woman to wash herself, and suddenly she’s got her foot up in the sink. It would never have occurred to me. It’s like a gift. Gillian saw herself smile and heard herself asking whether it was difficult to work with women who had no modeling experience. She stopped the shot. Now she looked disgusted. She clicked on until Hubert was next in a shot. The expression on his face was hard to interpret, a mixture of irony and sadness, or perhaps just conceit. She hit Play, and Hubert — as though coming out of a deep pause for thought — said, on the contrary. Professional models are practiced at reducing themselves to their bodies and wearing nudity like a garment. It’s striking how some women change throughbeing naked, and my looking at them. How the inside comes to the surface. It’s a very private moment. Gillian had the sense he was saying these sentences specifically to her and not thinking of the TV audience at all.
    Oftentimes nothing happens at all, he said. Generally I know before developing them whether the photographs will be any good, whether there’s something useful there. Then who’s the artist, you or the model? Gillian heard herself asking. It’s not about the artist, said Hubert, it’s about the work of art. And that has nothing to do with the model or the artist.
    Gillian ran the recording back to the beginning and watched the whole interview again, frame by frame. She wanted to work out what had transpired between them. Ninety seconds, more than two thousand individual shots. The secret lives of our bodies, she thought. Hubert was a chatterbox, which made it all the more striking to her that he had said what she was thinking, or perhaps had even given her the thought in the first place. She had often caught herself adopting other people’s ideas and taking them for her own.
    The dialog between their two faces was very different from the one she had just listened to. From the outset there seemed to be a tense intimacy between them, often a barely perceptible smile flickered over one of their faces, and once at least Gillian caught admiration in her eyes, a girlish beam. Hubert’s initial boredom gradually gave way to an expression of tenderness, which struck Gillian. Her own face in countershot looked down, as though his look confused her. She turned to face a different camera, and her face took on a rather foolish look of surprise anddelight — she was introducing the next segment. Gillian stopped the film and took the DVD out of the player. On TV, it was still the horseshoe crabs, which were now back in their native element, water. And so each year they lay their eggs, said the warm voice of the speaker, and probably will continue to do so long after human beings have vanished from the face of the earth.
    Gillian spent almost the whole day lying on the floor in the living room. Gradually she calmed down. She thought she was gaining strength, but when she pulled herself up, she felt dizzy. She sat there for a while and waited for it to pass. Then she picked up her crutches, which were lying beside her, and got up. It was easier