Chapter 18 models inc.

ONE

Yvonne hadn’t planned to meet me, hadn’t planned to fall in love, and hadn’t planned to have any free time to enjoy life. She had planned to make lots of money for her agency, and money only came from work.

When I could, and until it bored me, I joined Yvonne at her work. Photographic work is time consuming. It has its bright moments and its dull moments. I became excited and nervous at the same time by a new world I was seeing, and another side of Yvonne. I was once again dumbstruck by the way Yvonne became this “thing” that posed, pouted, used her fabulous eyes, her body, anything to achieve the right shots. I had never seen models at work before. It was new to me, so false and phoney. Amongst the hype there were the ridiculous words the photographers used to seduce Yvonne into the camera, to move her body, change her position, wherever she was. And Yvonne obliged. She made herself become “the look”, the model to look at. All eyes were on Yvonne. And once in a while I saw something that wasn’t phoney or fake. Sometimes Yvonne was a goddess. She gave off a feel, a presence that I found totally awe-inspiring, and I found it very difficult to return to my normal Yvonne when it was all over. Yvonne could snap out of it in a second, make-up plastered all over her face, her hair done up in the most amazing styles, and wearing clothes that were pinned and paraded in so many ways.

I knew it was Yvonne underneath it all. She spoke the same. Her eyes, through all that make-up, had the same sparkle. But until she was in relatively normal clothes, had her relatively normal make-up on and her hair was relatively free of bizarre products, I couldn’t relax. It was like nothing I could relate to. Where was she? Who was she? I sat back and watched, and Yvonne had to keep snapping me out of it. I tried closing my eyes and just listening to her voice, but the image of her wouldn’t go away.

She worked in the weirdest places, with the weirdest people, and Yvonne was weird. She was the Ice Princess; hardly smiled, never on film, totally professional, always on time and everything in a rush. Most days she would leave before I did and I would catch a taxi to wherever she was. If she had afternoon or evening jobs, then we would head off together.

I made sure I was never in the way. I sat in the background and watched everything, all the energy and paraphernalia that goes into capturing maybe only ten or fifteen useable shots. The amount of time, money and film involved was amazing. Yes, I was amazed. I was waking up, slowly, to this whole new world. I didn’t understand the lingo, whether French or English.

Yvonne could look at me while she was working. She had recovered from her smiling during the third show. But she only looked at me in between shots. And when she smiled it was only when we were alone or while she was being made up and having her hair done. Alone meant not having the camera pointed at her. Alone meant alone, but with the exception of the busy bees that surrounded her when she needed to be redone. Then Yvonne became a mutation of the Ice Princess and my Yvonne, the one I knew at home. The Ice Princess, I still didn’t know, I couldn’t talk to and didn’t understand. The mutated Yvonne, I sort of knew, was beginning to understand and become used to.

It was all make-believe, a lot of acting and nothing I could relate to. I liked, knew and enjoyed the real Yvonne, the one who came home, had a shower and, if I was lucky, washed her hair, removing all traces of those other two Yvonnes. Then I could relax, in our apartment with Yvonne walking around naked, drying herself with a towel. Most of the time she couldn’t wash her hair twice in one day, or three times if it had been washed for her work. I hated having to put up with her smelly, chemically-laden hair, and found it hard to see the tough, cool Yvonne at work, then not be able to have her all to myself after it was over.

It wasn’t too bad. We had a few days or mornings off here and there. And, as Yvonne had said, we enjoyed them when we could. I wasn’t special when Yvonne worked. Work came first. We talked, but as friends, not lovers. It was easier for everyone, especially us. For Yvonne to treat me as a lover, it would have meant being her, and at work she wasn’t her, she was these other people. In a way it brought us closer together. We could talk about issues and events outside our lives and our own intimate world. Yvonne wasn’t a mad people person like Jane. The people she worked with were sometimes friends, but mainly colleagues, workmates or just people she happened to be working with at the time.

People didn’t know who I was and sometimes I heard some very bizarre things being said about Yvonne behind her back, to her face, behind my back when they thought I wasn’t listening, or straight to my face. Yvonne was cold, she was aloof, she was a bitch, didn’t want to joke around and have fun. Sometimes these comments were directed as criticism and other times they were directed as remarks or facts, and often with respect. No-one, including myself, knew who Yvonne really was. She never hung around after the job was done, never mingled, just got the job done and went on to the next one. If she worked with people who had the same attitude, the job went smoothly, with no undercurrents or disharmony. And because Yvonne knew what she wanted, who she wanted to work with, and had been doing it for so long, most of the time that’s how it was. It was nothing like I had seen in the movies, music blasting, everyone having fun. It was serious and the jobs were done as quickly and as professionally as possible, even if they did take hours and hours. I was very impressed. The more I saw, the more I relaxed, and the more I relaxed, the more I was impressed by the whole procedure. It sounds like I’m contradicting myself, and maybe I am. But on first impression, and depending upon my mood, modeling was a complete waste of time as far as I could see. But later I saw the results and, more importantly, why it took so long to do everything. There was a reason behind each and every person’s actions and a reason for some of those actions to take as long as they did.

When it didn’t run smoothly and people didn’t know what they were doing, Yvonne either walked out, saying, “Call me when you are ready,” or we went for a coffee close by and someone would come and tell us when they were ready. Yvonne had no time for people who weren’t organized, ready and professional. It hardly ever happened. Yvonne went to great measures to see that it didn’t happen, and if it did, she was gone. They couldn’t work without her and soon got their act together. Yvonne didn’t care what the problem was. As far as she was concerned, she took care of her part of it and everyone else had to do the same. She was used to it, it didn’t bother her. It looked like it did. It looked like she was the coldest, bitchiest bitch ever, just walking out the way she did. She didn’t yell or scream. She was cold, froze everyone out. The first time it happened, I was taken totally by surprise. Yvonne never warned me as to how she did things; I had to see it for myself. I waited a while, listened to the sarcastic comments and then quietly, so no-one would notice, followed her out. Yvonne was fine. She said, “There is no point hanging around people who don’t know what they are doing.” She was calm. All part of the job. Never took it personally.

TWO

Living with a model. Her body is her work.

In my heart of hearts I’d known this from day one, and with a fantastic body like Yvonne’s, I didn’t want to mar it, despite my lust. I’d had that hammered home with great clarity and horror during the lovebite fiasco on her left buttock on display before a room full of people.

The stark reality of Yvonne’s body being her work was illustrated even more graphically for me when I saw a make-up lady spreading cover make-up on Yvonne’s thigh to cover up another lovebite I’d given her. She was having a helluva job trying to match the make-up to Yvonne’s exact skin tone. Cover-up make-up is okay for everyday use, but not before the camera. When I’d seen the lovebite on Yvonne’s left buttock, that had been catwalk, not “camera”. The camera picks up everything.

Yvonne said she was entitled to a proper sex life and she did remind me that photos were commonly airbrushed later, but she did agree that major hickeys and bites and scratches were out when she was working in front of the camera, and even for fittings where she was naked some of the time.

I tried, but I could not think of one place on Yvonne’s body where I could exercise my lust that wasn’t visible to the camera or to someone else. So my contribution to photographic shoots was to lay off biting, to restrain myself at climax and to not dig my fingernails into her flesh; to leave her body undamaged, the way a model’s body should be kept, until Yvonne was away from the dreaded see-it-all camera.

THREE

Those were work days. During our time off, we stayed in the apartment, went for walks, had dinner at different restaurants or at the homes of the very few friends Yvonne had, mainly Claude and Peter, who continued to comment on how much Yvonne had changed. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to know who she was before she met me; an Ice Princess and a working Yvonne were enough for me to take in. I suppose… no, I am very pleased that, through me and our relationship, Yvonne was changing into a smiling, more talkative, relaxed, caring woman. But that’s who I had met originally. Everything seemed to go in reverse. The more Yvonne and I went out to her work together, the more people talked to me about her. And the more I found that she wasn’t who she was. But she was, because she couldn’t have, in one night, changed into the person I knew and loved. They all had it wrong. They obviously didn’t know her and had never known her. They only knew the Yvonne she wanted them to know. I was the only one who was beginning to know the real Yvonne.