Carlow had come over for dinner earlier that evening and as we ate Lonnie said, in front of me, “Why don’t you take Elle out? She does nothing but work and read alone in her room. We can put Billy to bed once or twice.”

Carlow gave Lonnie a long look, probably wondering if she was trying to get rid of him. “Um-hmm,” he said finally, then, “Okay.”

“Take her to see your studio,” she said.

“Can I see the paintings?” I asked.

He ignored the question. “Do you want me to photograph you?” he said.

I thought it was a weird question, a weird way to ask. Why not May I photograph you? Would you mind if I photographed you? As if he’d be doing me a favor instead of the other way around.

“I thought you weren’t interested in photography anymore,” I said, trying to decide if Carlow looking at me through a camera lens would be something I wanted or not.

“I’m not really,” he said. “I don’t go around photographing women. I just wanted to all of a sudden.”

It was true, at least as far as I could tell, that he didn’t photograph women. Beyond Woman in a Double Frame there were no other realistic depictions of women—painted or otherwise—in his online portfolio. Most of the bodies he looked at were chopped up and genderless. I wondered if that’s what he wanted to do to my body. I was interested in what parts he would extract from the whole.

“What do you want me to do?” I asked now, hovering in his studio.

“Sit tight,” he said. “Let me get my camera.”

He came back holding two camera bags as well as a white stretch of fabric.

He studied me a moment before setting them down. “It’s much easier if your face doesn’t look so tense.”

“My face looks tense?”

He went about unzipping the camera bags. “Yes,” he said.

He squinted up at me from his kneeling position. When he rose, he put a hand in my hair, pulling it back, his face so close to mine I could feel his breath on my forehead. He walked over to the table and extracted a heavy-duty paper clip from the drawer, then spent a long time arranging my hair inside it. I wasn’t sure where to look as he worked. I could feel sweat pooling under my arms and along my upper lip. I hoped he wouldn’t notice as he pulled pieces of hair over my face, brushed them away, and pulled them back again. “It’s hard,” he said. “Posing.”

I said nothing.