Chapter XVI. Revelations.
XVI.
REVELATIONS.
LOS ANGELES.
If Anouk’s intention that Thursday was to watch me fall in love, she succeeded.
Our seats, in the sixth row, orchestra, at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion rendered us a heart-stopping view of the dance troupe’s performance.
All throughout the first and second acts, even during Revelations, which I had seen twice before, I was besotted.
The poetry, the grace, the lines, the art.
Bodies sinuous and sublime, slicing through air, unbound by gravity.
An utterly profound beauty. I wanted to be both of it and be witness to it at once.
And it struck me then: the desire to create a work that would affect my viewer the same way.
“Did you dance when you were young?” she asks me later when we are in the back seat of a Mercedes-Maybach S-Class being driven home. Naturally, she has a driver. She has, I have learned since my initial visit to her Brentwood estate, an entire staff.
In Paris, we didn’t even have a car.
“I did. Ballet. But I hit puberty early and lost my lines and my confidence.”
“I was all lines,” she says. “But I didn’t have the drive, or the will, or the discipline. I wanted to spend my Saturdays hanging at Les Halles with my girlfriends, sneaking cigarettes and flirting with boys. Not sweating in a studio doing piqués. My mother was not happy.”
I turn to look at her then. Her face slipping in and out of shadows, as we make our way toward the 110.
Intermittent streetlights catching her cheekbones, her jaw.
I try to imagine what she was like as a young teenager, petulant, rebellious.
Angular and awkward. The Anouk before Cabo.
I have difficulty reconciling her with the woman before me now.
The woman who is making me question everything. My sexuality, my identity, my Jamaican ideals and aversion to scandal. Everything I thought I knew about myself—what I would and would not do—is now up for debate.
She catches me studying her and smiles. “What?”
“I’m just … looking at you.”
For a moment she says nothing, but holds my gaze, intense. I am tempted to lean in, to kiss her. But there is the issue of the driver. And her husband. And mine. And so I opt for the next most intimate thing.
“I want to photograph you,” I say. “For my project on beauty, and our consumption of it. I want to photograph you.”
She smiles at me, coy, bites her lower lip. And I can’t make out if she’s mocking me or flirting. “I thought you’d never ask.”
Maybe this is a game to her. Maybe it’s not. But either way, I’m in.
Later, after she has dropped me off, and I have let Parisa go and made sure the kids are both asleep, I lie in bed and think of her. And think of her.