by
Stan Connors
The church bells rang the faithful to prayer. From the bedroom in the
second floor in the apartment that I shared with my girlfriend, Mona,
and another couple I heard the car doors thunking, the kids shouting,
adults talking and trying to reign their offspring in, and the bells
chiming away. Mona stirred beside me.
"Why do they have to make so much noise on a Sunday morning," she said
with a sigh. "Don't they care that people like to sleep on Sundays?"
"I suppose it is to call everyone to prayer," I said. "To wake everyone
up like they do to us every Sunday morning and remind them of their
duty. Now we have to go down there and atone for our sins."
"Oh, god," Mona said and rolled over with a sigh. "You go ahead for me.
you have more than I do."
The party the night before had been a good one. The reverberations from
the clamor of the church bells ricocheted throughout my throbbing head.
The party had been a bash at Joe and Peggy's house out on the bay along
a place named, oddly enough, Boston Harbor. We were, in fact,
three-thousand miles away from the city of Boston, Massachusetts, and
its harbor, though along the same latitude, in Washington State in the
rain-soaked Pacific Northwest. But the bay had been named for that
famous harbor in Massachusetts. I could still hear the blasting strains
of the GreatFul Dead, Led Zeppelin, Janis Joplin blaring out that
anthem of the 1960's, "Bobby McGee." "Busted down in Baton Rouge,
waiting for a train...windshield wipers slapping time...," she wailed
through the speakers as we all diligently worked our way through
several ounces of pot and a couple kegs of Olympia beer that quenched
our thirst from all the bongs and pipes making the rounds. We had no
idea how we even got home. Someone had driven us. I did somehow manage
to remember that I had a paper to write on Sunday that I absolutely
could procrastinate on no longer. Otherwise, we probably would have
just stayed at Joe and Peggy's and not had to suffer the rude intrusion
of the church bells on our sleep and pain.
I tried to hide from the agony in the pillow and snuggled up closer to
Mona. She groaned. Mona and Peg were best friends. They were
photography students and often went out on "Photo trips" together. They
usually went up into Tacoma or Seattle to see whatever they could find
that caught their eye. Where I had difficulty in even getting a picture
to be something besides a blur, Mona could make a simple photograph
seem alive. Her camera eye could either find or make extraordinary
images out of the most mundane things that my untrained eye simply
glossed over. We had been lovers for a year, having met at another of
Peg's parties, a photo party. I had never been to one of these before
and had gone when I had nothing special to do at the invitation of Joe.
"There will be some nice-looking girls there," he said.
The party was an odd affair for a guy that was almost too shy in front
of a lens to have his driver's license picture taken. Camera lights
flashed all around, shooting at anything. Most of those aiming the
cameras were women; guys were the ones getting the flashbulbs in their
eyes. Mona had been at that party. She was a sun-drenched goddess from
San Francisco, California, a girl seemingly born to wear flowers in her
hair to complement a sensuous set of blue-green eyes, and ample
femininity to cause serious thoughts of temptation.
We finally managed to wrench ourselves from the bed. The clamor of the
bells had, at long last, ceased. I threw on the bathrobe that Mona had
given me for Christmas and stumbled downstairs to start the coffee.
Mona and Peg were going out on another of their photographic
adventures. In normal circumstances, I would have gone with them. It
was a nice and sunny day, unusual in the rainy Pacific Northwest, but
there was this deadline hanging over my head like a noose that I could
no longer ignore.
"Have fun," Mona teased.
I settled down at my desk in our room. Our bedroom featured an alcove
that jut out from the building like a chin. There was a window in the
alcove, four rows of four pained glass square windows, affording a view
of the church across the street, and the cityscape of church spires,
the sky scrapers and the tops of buildings, and the giant masts of the
cargo ships out in the harbor, the jagged lines of the Olympic
mountains beyond them in the distance. I had begun to pound away on the
typewriter keys when, suddenly, I heard a familiar lick. It came from
the door. I knew what it was.
Mona stood in the doorway.
"Don't move," she said. "The shadows on you are perfect."
In my year with Mona I had become used to being the study of the lens.
s Considering my shyness this was a remarkable feat, but Mona had a
special way of making it seem easy for me, something enhanced by her
sensuality and that we loved each other.
"Smile," she said.
I flashed one of my goofy smiles. Mona had forgotten something so had
turned back from the coffee shop and the rendezvous with her friend.
She saw me sitting in the alcove, slaving over my typewriter, trying to
haul words out of my head that would suit a paper on Shakespeare. The
windows had splayed the morning light across me. Mona's photographic
saw this. She stood in the doorway and snapped a few shots. I heard the
clicking of the camera. Mona moved in from the doorway, shooting all
the way, looking at the different angles. I then recalled that I had on
nothing else but that flimsy bathrobe.
"The light and the shadows look nice on my robe," Mona said. "You wear
it well."
I gave her that goofy smile again. It was both fun and strange to be on
camera. I was never much to attract attention to myself, had never
needed it, yet it was fun and somewhat exciting, at times even erotic,
to have it trained on me with this lady behind it using my shape and
form as a canvass out of which to capture the mood of any given moment.
"Lean back on the couch," Mona said.
I did. Click. Pressure was building between my legs. There was only
this thin line between me and nothing. Did Mona see what she had
caused?
I started to feel embarrassed, afraid that Mona might see how large I
was getting because of what she was doing with her camera. Another
click. Then another. Mona was almost above me. Every shot from now on
was a close-up. I made a joke about her going on her photo trip.
"I might not get to that," she said. "There are more pressing matters
at hand now."
I laughed.
"She will miss you," I said.
"Oh, well," Mona said. "Here, stand up."
I obeyed, caught up in the moment at hand. In the process, I somehow
hooked the tie of the robe on the desk. The tie slipped off and the
robe fell open just as Mona squeezed the Nikon's trigger. We both were
in shock. It had happened so fast.
"Oh, my god," Mona said. "I'm really sorry. I'll destroy the film."
Mona was sincere. In all of our photo sessions, whether planned or
improvised, that it had taken to wring the shyness out of me me we had
never done a nude. Much of this was, of course, sheer nerves on my
part. Who would see the results? I could almost hear the comments of my
friends slung behind my back. This happened back in the 1970's and,
though such women's magazines like Playgirl had begun to break down the
barriers of sexual taboos, it was still generally unacceptable for a
male to be recorded in the au natural for a woman's viewing pleasure.
The consequences could be grim if the results ever got beyond us and
the best way to avoid that was for me to keep my clothes on.
Yet, I had often wondered what being fully exposed on camera would be
like. I could well remember the incredible eroticism that I had
experienced a couple years before, being disrobed and exhibited by a
woman for her visual fun. I remembered the sensations that flowed
within me as that lady's eyes roved all over my disrobed figure. But
with a lens staring at my exposition it was different: it would live
beyond the moment of each click.
An organ began to bang away and singing erupted from within the church
across the street. It was the moment of truth. Should I refold the robe
over me or let it slip off? The opportunity was there; so was that
familiar nervousness. I wondered which one would win. The singing rose
in pitch; the organ let go with more blasts.
Curiosity won. I slipped the robe off. It fell to the floor around my
legs. I stood before Mona with nothing on but my wristwatch. That, too,
soon came off.
"Go ahead," I said.
Mona's eyes almost popped out of her head.
"Are you sure?" she asked.
I leaned over and kissed her. Mona went to work.
I watched the hair sweep down over Mona's shoulders and how the rhythms
of her femininity moved as she positioned the camera to take in the
bounty now offered from every point of the compass, working in the
lights and shadows that had caused it all for good measure. Mona looked
so beautiful, so tempting, yet it was me that was the temptation and
she was the one looking. Though Mona had seen me in the raw at least a
thousand times before, this was different. I was the subject. She was
the conquistador, the huntress, who could bend and fold me as her
desires dictated.
"Look at that," Mona cooed in her best bedroom voice. "You are quite
excited."
Mona put her hand on my staff. Tremors of eroticism strong enough to
cause a volcano shook my body and forced that flag to almost stand
completely off the end of its tether. Click. The lens worked on the
images of her hands around me. I breathed deeply and watched the lens
hover around that part of me the people sitting over there in church
would call sin. It was just about impossible to keep standing in the
face of so much pleasure. Then Mona guided my hand down to that staff,
telling me to work it myself.
"I need both hands to work the camera," Mona said.
I slowly went up and down. The organ brought the singing up again.
There was something about "Christ, our lord Jesus, amen." I had reached
that crescendo as well.
"I wonder if the faithful down there can see us," I said.
"Maybe they need to," Mona said, with relish. "Then they might see god
like I am seeing it."
She knelt down for a head on. My knees nearly gave way from the wild
sensations of watching a beautiful woman aim a lens straight at me. The
camera and the organ sounded. Mona got down for a shot from below,
making me look down at her as she aimed up, and I was practically in
pain from trying to hold it in under these circumstances. Mona
maneuvered me into this and that position -- on the couch, on the bed,
me kneeling back, legs spread, or kneeling and touching it with my
finger. The hot eroticism flowing within me like a nuclear current had
climbed higher than that church spire. I had become Mona's now and
wanted to be so even more, but it was impossible to hold it in any
longer. Mona understood. She fired the last shot that she had and,
pulling aside her dress just enough to let me into heaven, jumped right
up on top of me. Like me, Mona was hot and rigid, something I had
missed during all the clicking and the singing. The church bells
started up again, banging through the ether as Mona, moaning almost as
loud as the bells, banged me and the force of our explosions seemed to
all but shoot us through the apartment walls and into the church.
"I wonder who saw God," I said when my breath finally came back.
Mona snuggled against me. We held each other close. I loved the feel of
her dress on my naked body. We heard the people file out of the
worship. There was a hum of voices with occasional shouts, the car
doors thunked again, and engines fired up. We lay in each other's arms
retrieving our breath and thinking about what had just happened. Then
it was silent. The worshipers had gone away for another week.
"Damn," Mona said. "Let's get some more film."
We would do that later. We were both too exhausted to get out of bed in
the silence when the church bells had finished their day's mission.
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