Bill closed the door and kissed me for the first time, his tongue meaty and probing, his breath with a trace of cigarettes as his mustache—surprisingly soft—tickled my face. He asked if I minded not going into the bedroom, and I shook my head; it was sweet that as excited as he was, even he had compunctions. One last request: he didn’t have time to bathe before he picked me up, so he told me to make myself comfortable in the living room while he hopped in the shower.

That was when I ended up alone in Bill’s living room. I took off my clothes down to my black panties and a negligee top, sheer except for a row of three black velvet hearts that ran across the chest, covering my nipples until I raised my arms. I picked up my camera and stood in front of a large gold-framed mirror hung on one of the walls, with fading family pictures wedged between the glass and the frame.

I looked through the viewfinder and took pictures of myself, making sure to keep those family photographs in the frame—a kid’s birthday party, Bill and Barbara sitting on a boat, even one from their wedding, which looked like it had happened in the ’70s, Bill with a full head of dark wavy hair while Barbara, a pretty brunette, wore a long-sleeved white gown whose train extended several rungs below the top of the church steps they were standing on. I felt a pang then, my conscience, but the collective voices of my photo professors drowned it out, with stories of how Diane Arbus woke subjects up at sunrise to get them at their most vulnerable, how Nan Goldin took out the doors to her bathroom so she could take pictures of people having sex or doing drugs, and how the French artist Sophie Calle even worked as a maid at a hotel just to take pictures of guests’ private belongings. Art had a looser set of ethics than life, which gave me permission to take advantage of this moment to highlight the contrast between this man’s family, the sanctity of his marriage, the place of his wife, and what the two of us were about to do, who I was about to be.