I stayed where I was. The last thing I wanted was to get into a small enclosed space with Rudy Sancerre. I stared down at the counter I was leaning against. It was littered with polaroids. I looked at the ones of Lupe, pretending to examine them again, wondering how to get us out of there. Whether or not Rudy Sancerre was getting any action, he certainly knew a lot of women. There were blondes, brunettes, an exotic oriental beauty with unnaturally thick hair curling to her waist. The idea of him inspecting them and sniffing them like a dog made me sick, but I was fascinated. I kept shuffling through the piles of polaroids.

I was surprised to hear Lupe say she wanted to see the darkroom. I glanced over, but she didn’t see me. Lupe was like the women in the photos I was looking at. Ambitious but a little naive, starting to get hard and shopworn around the edges before they reached their midtwenties. The innocent girl, but with the look in the eye that says fuck me harder. No wonder Lupe’s brother was looking for her.

They were mostly the standard head-shot setup. It was interesting how empty most of the women looked, as if something had already been taken from them, something burned out of them. Most of the women, if not actually good looking, managed to convey an empty, almost pathetic eagerness to please that molded their features into conventional friezes. I thought about the pictures of Cathy Vega. There was something slightly different from the others, something that looked alive about her in the photo. It was the inability to really fit the mold, although the desire to do so was clearly there in the hairdo, the makeup. Something about the picture of Cathy Vega showed she was playing a part even as she was being photographed. She must have been a very bad actress.

“What’s that?” I heard Lupe ask.

“That’s the developing solution,” Rudy Sancerre said. He sounded like a guide at Disneyland; part patience, part artificial cheer. He sounded like Mr. Peepers with a hard-on. I half expected the door to the darkroom to swing shut and the red light above the door to go on.

“This stuff really stinks,” she said.

“Then we put it in the tray with the wash solution.”

I went back to looking at the photographs. It sounded as if he were keeping his hands to himself. There was a gorgeous redhead with a frizzy halo, like a soiled Botticelli angel in black lingerie. There were several shots of a tall black woman with her hair braided.

“Now, Lupe, I’ll show you how we print a photograph. Just close the door and...”

“I take mine to Fotomat.”