Chapter 6

Anent: sibling rivalry:

I felt myself more drawn to June because June read my books. She took the trouble to drive to town, to go to the Book Basement on King Street, and buy a copy of every book still in print.

I don't think I am vain about my writing, nor do I set great store by it. But it is, even so, a report on what I see and feel. It is communication. It is one half of a conversation; something more, hopefully, than an ms. found in a bottle.

Elza did not read very much. Curiosity did not inspire her to read even those books of mine June brought to Seabrook. (Except, I later learned, certain lurid pages detailing the passions of Amy-passages June had marked and shown her.)

"You'd rather screw June," Elza claimed, "because she has bigger tits."

To stabilize matters, I found it useful to make love to both together as often as possible. Each time, of course, there was the ceremonial snapping of pictures, each time the ceremonial payment of modeling fees. And both, each time, the record should show, were punctilious about the duties of a model.

All in all-and I congratulated myself-our arrangement was artful, urbane, happy. I had available, at any hour, day or night, two of the most delectable young girls to be found anywhere, a boon to my body, inspiration for my work. And they had, in turn, a hardy income which I could well afford, and which lowered my tax outlay. (I put no premium on my humble person, or on my services as companion and guide.)

"Daddy wants to know when the book is coming out," Elza announced one day while scrutinizing her chest in the mirror on the bathroom door.

"I think we ought to show him some pictures," June said.

Both had just taken off some several hundred dollars' worth of new finery. Long past were the days of the dingy dungarees, of simple halter and shorts. Nor did they anymore arrive naked. They arrived looking always like the models they presumably were; and they undressed with proper exhibitionistic pride.

Unfortunately, the only pictures I had taken thus far were unexhibitable nudes-many in the compromising positions so generously suggested by June. Nor had I bothered to have these developed. One does not take nudes of well-known Charleston girls to a local photofinisher to be developed and printed.

And I had been too lazy, too uninterested, perhaps too occupied, to process them myself. Not that that at ah mattered in this instance; neither Mr. nor Mrs. Poltergrue would be cheered by my various views of their golden daughters cavorting in the buff.

It was still early afternoon. There would be fight until eight.

I suggested that both climb back into their St. Laurent or Von Furstenburg frocks, their mono-grammed lace panties, adjust their new earrings, new bracelets, and drive with me to the city.

June thought it would be nice if they modeled a little on the bed, "just to start the afternoon."

I scheduled twenty minutes for this warm-up. ("Just to relax us," Elza said.) Then we drove to town.

Once below Broad Street, I accomplished in two hours-perhaps three-almost all that I had planned when the idea for the book first came to me. (Although these were prim, formal shots-not my planned, lush nudes.) I took pictures of each alone, both together, (I) leaning against the cannon on East Battery; (2) in front of the Sword Gate on Legare Street (near Amy's old house); (3) in the doorway of St. Stephen's; (4) at the entrance to the Old Market; (5) embracing the base of the monument to Sergeant Jasper ("Next time we'll embrace the old boy himself," June said, with handsome glee, "and we'll both be naked."); and several other poses in as many other local shrines.

I took careful shots, using a large-format camera which until then I had kept in reserve (Mamiya RB 67. with 120 mm. f.3:8 lens), a tripod, and an orange filter, where necessary (for dark cloud effects).

When we were through, I took the film, and the girls, to the photo studio of an old friend of mine (John Young), on Market Street.

I introduced him to the twins, heard him say "wow," June say "wow," Elza say "groovy"-a sudden reversion to the limited vocabulary of our first meeting. Young people today apparently have special greeting syllables, to be understood only in terms of Grimm's Law, Verner's Law, and the Principle of Least Effort. The ceremony, in any event, is a vast improvement over the greeting rituals of young dogs.

My friend agreed to develop, proof-print, eventually enlarge "for publication," rolls of film I handed him. He was kind, warm, understandably interested in the charm and proportions of my twins.

"I like your mustache," June said to John. "I like all of you," John said to June. "I could use you."

"You bet you could," Elza said, with the pride of a press agent.

June kissed his cheek, a kindness in return for his kindness in processing the film. "When the book comes out, we're going to run a lobster stud farm. You must drop over."

John kissed her hand, the gesture of an artist who hoped one day to study in Paris.

When we left, I took the girls to Henry's for drinks and dinner. John's place is on Market, between King and Meeting streets. Henry's, Charleston's most esteemed seafood place (and which has an atmosphere much like P. J. Clarke's in New York), is also on Market Street-but a few blocks east, facing the open stalls of the market.

"Let's not go home tonight." This was Elza's suggestion.

"Don't your father and mother expect you?"

"We told them we might stay in town-particularly if we worked late. They don't like us to be driving late at night. We said if we worked too late, we would stay at Larrine's."

"Larrine's in Washington."

"They don't know that," June said.

Elza pointed to her head. "They're not very hip."

June put her hand on mine, to say, tacitly, "Pretty please!"

Elza was even more persuasive. "If we stay in town tonight, we could get up at dawn ... and do the real thing ... really."

"Stark, silly naked." June smiled. "And you could send the prints to Lady Cholmondeley."

"Where would you like to stay?"

"At the Mills-Hyatt House, with you, silly." June found me, if not altogether square, at least impercep-tive.

"We're really on the pill now," Elza said. "Really. You won't even have to be careful."

I gave each of them her customary modeling fee, and ordered dinner. It occurred to me that I had acquired an exceedingly pleasant $200-a-day habit. Life was nowhere as doleful as old Schopenhauer suspected.

"Two separate rooms," I said nonchalantly to the room clerk, a blonde, smiling young man who reminded me of Jimmy Carter. "A double for Mrs. June and myself. A single for Mrs. June's sister."

"They're almost identical," he said, interest written in electronic letters on his watery blue eyes.

"They are," I agreed, repressing the addendum, "and interchangeable."

"The luggage is in the trunk of the car," I said to the bell captain, handing him the key. Fortunately, I kept my camera gear (two cameras, extra lenses, tripod, lights, film) in two suitcases.

I registered as Mr. and Mrs. Jean June (suggested by jejune) and Miss May Hemme, and put down as address the address of my agent, on Madison Avenue in New York. My American Express card, flashed on registering, assured the clerk that all was in order. Money talks.

"That won't be necessary, sir," he said, with the po-litesse one expects in Charleston.

Only seconds later I realized that my card carried the name, "Beauregard Benton," and had expired the previous month.

There is much music, I believe, in the charm and abstract courtesy of old Charleston.

One of my bags had a quart of Smith's Glenlivet, an accessory always useful for steadying models' nerves, stirring the photographer's imagination, cleaning lenses. This was in the bag deposited in "Elza's" room. We took it out of the bag, rumpled her bed (for good form's sake), retired to the double bedroom.

"Force a little down my throat," Elza said.

Each of us took a hearty slug from the bottle. Then we showered. We were tired, sticky, grimy from the first legitimate picture-making of our combined operation. And all for what? To give Mummy and Daddy a few prints to frame for lamp tables and pianos, and to mail, proudly, to relatives in the Redneck up-country.

We had a second drink after the shower; a third, a fourth. The details of what followed are no longer significant. There was no need anymore to use "quondams." Of this I was volubly assured. I could do what I wanted; in any way, in any stance, and as often as the spirit moved me.

With this understanding established, I got into bed between them. June passed the bottle. We each had a final, Independence Day slug. Then, with Glenlivet's blessings within us, we all fell asleep.

I woke about four o'clock. Moonlight, filtering without friction through harbor clouds, spread itself on our bed. The chimes of St. Michael's rang solemnly, announcing to the dreaming city that all was well, even if the bells were a semitone flat and five minutes late.

On either side of me were my sleeping nymphs, breathing deeply, oblivious, as youth is, to the pulls of anxiety. Elza, face buried in pillow, slept with her rump upraised, as if expecting an enema.

Reaching right, reaching left, I assured myself of the reality, curvature, solidity of this treasury of nymplidom. I sampled each buttock, circumnavigated by touch the perimeter of each pleasure dome, pleasure niche; debated with myself the arguments for and against each of my several tactical options. In the process I, again, fell off to sleep.

What woke me, ultimately, was the clasp of Elza's wet, slithering lips on my manhood. "Time to go to work," she announced from the corner of her mouth, her enunciation slightly blurred.

June stirred, sighed.

"Kiss her once ... there," Elza mumbled, expressing a touching sense of concern, charity, togetherness.

Without detaching my center from Elza's oral sweetness, I turned a half-somersault, kissed June tenderly "there."

"Ah," June sighed, opening her thighs.

"Time to go to work." My words, like Elza's, lacked the bell tones of classical articulation. They sounded as if spoken through the double reed of an oboe.

"Oh, no!" Half-sleep dulled her articulation; half-sleep and a confusing dream. "Don't stop."

In my inverted, fetal position, it was a simple matter to touch Elza "there."

"Ummm," she said. Her thighs swung apart. The separation was in no way required; it was, however, heartening and hospitable-nature's way of spreading out a welcome mat.

I hoped my own anatomical responses were heartening to Elza in more or less the same way, although no man is at his erectile best when roused from deep sleep at this unprepossessing hour.

June, in her half-sleep, heaved, groaned, quivered, dreaming, no doubt, of some provincial Lochinvar pleasuring himself en route to a hockey puck.

Nor did Elza resist the apocalyptic effect of my adroit touch. We thus had dual, synchronous, parallel patterns of heaving, groaning, quivering preludes to wet dream-flow.

Nor did I resist, or try to resist, the charm, efficacy, peristalsis of Elza's shrewd lips.

"You're a bastard, Beauregard," Elza announced with stripling pride as the expected occurred.

I had planned, long back, that if and when we ever got around to actual nude shots at the historic places, I would have the girls arrive on location wearing only raincoats. The raincoats could be dropped on cue. If possible spectators were sighted, the raincoats could be pulled back on. The actual nudity on site could thus be limited to the minute or so it would take me to shoot, advance film for the next picture.

This morning the girls were without raincoats. Their only clothes were under things and their expensive high-fashion dresses. Even the dresses were not easy to take off; they had to be unbuttoned, unzipped, then pulled up over the head.

We decided to make the best of what could not be avoided. The girls left off panties and bra. And in the car, they kicked off shoes. If people came on us unexpectedly, it was agreed, they would make a dash for the car, lock the doors, huddle down.

The sun had just emerged from the sea when we arrived at the Battery. I decided that we would make our first shot a view of the harbor, shot from the high wall of East Battery.

I had the girls stand with their backs to me, looking over the harbor toward Fort Sumter.

"Groovy," June said.

"Great," said Elza.

I set my Mamiya RB 67 on a tripod, had the girls, still clothed, pose while I took an exposure reading, focused, set shutter speed, aperture.

Black morning clouds were stretched out like chocolate eclairs. It was high tide; a stiff onshore breeze stirred whitecaps on the harbor waves. Herring gulls, waiting to be fed by tourists, were perched on the wall's railings, one bird to each post.

"Ready?" I asked.

"Ready when you are, B.B., " June said.

Simultaneously, each pulled her dress up over her head, handed it to me.

The city was empty, silent, ours. A lone loping Irish setter was on the sidewalk, across the street, sniffing at the palmetto in front of the colonnades of Larrine's house.

The girls turned to face the harbor, their hair swept toward me by the wind. There was not a surplus curve to their bodies, nor a curve not proper to its place. I shot half a roll (four frames) of their ideal backs, varying only angle of attack and aperture.

I then had them turn, look toward me, eyes on ground, bottoms pressed against the top rail.

"Don't smile," I said. "Be mystical, deprived, brooding. Think of Catherine Deneuve."

"I'd rather think of Mastroianni," Elza said.

Her sister, elevating her breasts, said, "My ass is cold."

The Irish setter came over, entranced, as I was, by the spendid sight of spring-steel adolescence. A long-haired dachshund trundled toward him.

When the roll was finished, the girls put their dresses back on. We walked south to the cannon on the prow of Whitepoint Gardens.

"Hello again," June said, patting the first cannon on its nearest flank. "Missed us, didn't you?"

A delivery truck drove by. An anonymous hand waved.

MechanciaUy, the girls stripped. Once again the chic dresses ascended the tanned bodies, opened like flowers above their heads, then were tossed to me.

Once more I made the derriere shots over a cannon, singly and paired; once more I photographed the girls astride the iron phallus. I repeated, in short, the poses of the preceding day. The two sets of pictures were identical except for the on-again, off-again draping of the models-as in Goya's alternate vestida and desnuda versions of the recumbent Duchess of Alba.

"My God, the gnats are out this morning," Elza proclaimed, slapping the parts used for usual recumbency.

"In this climate," June said, "to get turned on, you need a lot of Off-if you want to get turned on al fresco."

She then spied a morning jogger and got dressed. Elza, more adventurous, simply ducked behind the cannon and slapped at gnats.

Our first tactical problem occurred at St. Stephen's. I had left the car in the parking lot of the Old Armory across the street, which is to say at the most celebrated junctures of Charleston streets, the overlap of Slight and Shaftesbury streets.

The girls had had the audacity to cross Shaftesbury Street naked. They flattened themselves against the massive oaken entrance doors to the church; and these poses were useful, silhouetting, unexpected. I repeated the stances before the unlocked, intricately wrought iron gates leading to the cemetery.

Because these precincts were consecrated ground, I insisted on no frontal nudity. No less could I do to revere the memory of those signers of the Declaration of Independence who lay buried there, men who in breathing, livid, vital flesh would have reveled in such nudity-particularly in girls as "human, all too human" as my vibrant twins.

"This is where Td like to lay," Elza said.

"Personally..." June was less romantic. "Personally ... I like the Mills-Hyatt House."

Time, unfortunately, had passed. We had lost track of it, absorbed as we were in our private worlds, our experimental, un-fig-leafed Eden.

A buzz of voices realigned private time with the time of the clock. The chimes above us struck the half-hour, signifying seven-thirty.

Tourists appeared. Women in slacks, bursting amidship: men in shorts, the better to display their spindled, spaghetti-thread legs. And with them came a babel of voices, their own-Bronx, Brooklyn, Milwaukee voices, dedicated to breakfasts, grandchildren, medications-and the stentorian voice of the travel-tour cassette, directing them where to look, when to turn, how to find the nearest comfort station, if any.

It was not possible, at this unscheduled moment, to justify a wild dash to the parked car.

No more would anyone accept a legend about mermaids, or about the incarnation of the beautiful girls once said to have walked the corsairs' plank. (Low Country legend has it that such girls returned to this life in the form of the graceful, lambent skimmers who, each day, dip into the last, lapping waves which break on the beaches of the barrier islands.)

"Where can we hide?" June asked, with a modest show of panic, meanwhile adjusting her pristine pubic hairs to maximize privacy.

"Duck into the graveyard," I said, my words, I felt, no more than a meaningless approximation of relief. Semantically they grouped themselves into an orthodox sentence. But whether or not the sentence had meaning was another matter. How much defense of modesty could be had from tombstones lying flat on the ground-and with inscriptions by now in part, or wholly, illegible? The girls outdid me.

They were not addicted to my advice; nor were thef as helpless as I supposed. They disappeared.

My eye intercepted a golden streak, the lightning of June's Olympic thighs as they disappeared through the opened door at the rear of the church.

All augured well. Ecclesiastical history, I recalled, exalted the fig leaf. The Greek rooms in the Vatican look like drying rooms for albino figs. Ecclesiastical history, now more ecumenical, was now destined to be enriched by the loss of such artifices. Less is more.

I hoped merely that my insouciant models, in the interest of taste, which is cardinal in Charleston, would have the foresight to stay out of the pulpit. The community could well abjure naked truth waving itself from an oratory-waving itself, moreover, in twinned consonance.

The tourists moved on en masse, as is the way with tourists. People en masse move much as sheep move, and make, more or less, the same woolly, ovine sounds. Many carried the standard discount-house Instamatic cameras; some the standard sale-priced Japanese cameras; others carried cassette playback decks which, on command, delivered fragments of a guided-tour talk.

The sun, still young, cast long shadows. The long shadows of the legs of the tourists overlapped the shadows of the tombstones. A mourning dove, unseen, sounded his ominous "Coo-wee, coo-wee, coo, coo, coo."

A cassette player, suddenly touched, informed the group of its whereabouts: "You are now on Church Street facing the Dock Street Theater, once the old Planter's Hotel. There is a legend that the fabulous Lola Montez once..."

Suddenly I saw my girls-my models, my charges, my twinned loves. They had not ascended the pulpit. They had not climbed the belfry. Neither were they prancing about like nudist Doukhobors. They emerged from the same church door they entered, striding out proudly, with sober step, arms akimbo, tresses flowing, in somber choirboy robes.

Only one sartorial detail jarred the observer's eye: they were barefoot, as if on a penitential march.

At this moment the rector arrived, tall, poised, with Byronic features, and, as rectors go, perfectly shod: His eyes rested on Elza and June, so naked under the robes; June conspicuously so, for, in such instances, choir robes, to be properly fitted, call desperately for a bra.

The rector, in his ecumenical way, looked only at their feet, knowing in his heart that many who love most move to their appointed rounds on naked feet; and that never are the cherubim shod.

"My brother," said Elza, "always dances to the altar."

"Ah so," said the rector, a patient man.

June, holding two fingers in front of her lips, went, "Mi ... mi ... mi ... mi ... mi." The upper part of her robe swung gently from side to side, as if supported by peaks of Jell-O.

"Quite a new breed, this generation of choirboys." The rector looked at me. "Slightly epicene. Terribly ecumenical."

"Wow," said Elza.

"They all talk soprano ... and sing bass."