He bends over her body like an awning over a warm sidewalk, shading her as he snaps the photograph. The woman is naked save for a sheer piece of yellow linen that will appear light gray in the picture. It was not chosen for its color, but for the way the soft dark mound of her pubis looks beneath it, like the mossy crook between two smooth stones. The photographer, gray-haired like the film he processes so carefully, loves few things more than the sight of a woman in front of his camera.

The photographer’s daughter walks into the studio just as the model—who is not much older than she—walks behind a folding screen. The girl catches a glimpse of the woman’s bare buttocks and stops; she never gets used to the sight of her father so near to a naked woman not her mother.

“Darling,” he says. The photographer holds his hands out to her and she takes them, happy to be with him. He holds her close, kisses her downy pale cheek with his freckled lips and tells her that he’s been waiting so long for this day; she has never allowed him to photograph her before, not since she was a small child. The girl, petite and conch-colored, nods sharply. On the walk over, the wind grabbed at her hair making it lash whip-quick against her skin, leaving her red and raw. She apologizes, says she brought makeup just in case.

“No, love. No need.” Her father sees beautiful women on a regular basis, photographs them in various stages of undress, in various states of life. He has even photographed the dead. None is so beautiful as this person he and his wife created from thin air.

The girl takes off her trench coat and stands in front of a white background in only her black nightgown, which she was instructed to wear. At eighteen, she is willow-thin and her nipples are hard in the cold, obvious under the thin satin of the nightgown. Perhaps if an outside observer were to see her father taking pictures of his scantily clad daughter they would think he was a pervert, but the girl knows he only wants to photograph her well. She admits to herself that she looks better this way, under his trained aesthetic eye; in the real world she wears jeans and t-shirts and clunky brown boots.

She sits on the stool there, under lights that her father adjusts to point directly at her eyes. It’s too bright, she says.

“Close your eyes,” her father says. “I’ll tell you when to open them.”

At the moment before he snaps the photograph, which sounds more like a medical procedure with its whizzes and pings, her father says, “Open, darling.”

The model stands there, dressed in black like Audrey in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, her hair piled elegantly and effortlessly on her head. She lays her hand on the photographer’s shoulder where her fingernails look glassy and unreal. She looks more mannequin than human, and the girl can’t tell whether she’s twenty or forty from the darkness beyond the bright umbrella lights.

“So beautiful,” she says in an accent the girl can’t place. She can’t be French, perhaps Italian. “You must be proud.”

The photographer nods and takes another photograph of his daughter before saying he has to change the film. The model approaches her, black patent leather heels clacking against the concrete floor like giant beetles. She leans over until her face is so close to the girl’s that their breath is the same.

“Sometime, when you’re not busy, perhaps you’d let me photograph you, too?” the model asks and hands the girl a card made of stiff brown paper inked in gold. Printed on the card a phone number and a name: Camellia.

The girl’s father watches them and is tempted to say something, intervene. Instead, he shrugs as his daughter looks excitedly, anxiously at him, as if to say, Do what you want. I can’t stop you.

 

#

The photographer’s daughter likes girls. She’s known this since age twelve when a boy told her she was pretty and she felt nothing. Camellia is on her mind constantly, the card never far from her hand. She carries it around and fingers its edges so often that it is now bent and creased. She reminds herself not to touch it so much, that she’ll lose the number printed there.

The photographer’s picture of his daughter is printed in The New York Times along with an advertisement for a retrospective of his work. The girl cringes every time she sees the picture, and then reminds herself she must call Camellia soon.

Camellia rents a studio in Brooklyn to take photographs. She sleeps on a creaky brown sofa bed and does not have a kitchen. Until recently, her clients have been brides and families with newborns and children making their First Communion. The neighborhood is Catholic and the bells of the church ring almost constantly. It’s always some saint’s feast day in this neighborhood. Camellia receives a call from the photographer’s daughter on the feast of St. Peregrine, who lived in Forli not far from her birthplace. She remembers a few prayers in Italian, but does not feel what she once felt while praying them. Camellia tells the photographer’s daughter to come to her studio that evening.

In May, the trees around her studio bloom pink and gold. The petals fall to the ground only to be stepped on, driven over, ground into the ever-building layer of grime until they are no longer petals at all. Camellia goes outside to rescue some of the blooms, wraps their freshly injured stems in a damp paper towel and waits for the girl to arrive.

She is smaller than Camellia remembers. She towers over the girl, who has the widest owlish eyes she’s ever seen.

“Are you nervous?” Camellia asks. She knows the answer already. The girl nods quickly, once. Camellia does not know that the girl has been dreaming of her for months, touching herself to sleep at the brief memory of her naked back. Camellia tells the photographer’s daughter to take off her clothes.

After the gray t-shirt is gone and the dark blue jeans too, the girl stands before Camellia in her white cotton underwear like a paper doll, trembling. She tells the girl to take off everything, and then lays the pinkest of the flower petals across the girl’s small breasts. The color of her nipples is indistinguishable from the flowers themselves. She tells the girl to shut her eyes and open them when she says. The girl remembers how she dreamt of seeing Camellia again, how she wondered if Camellia had ever been real in the first place. Camellia uses only one small light, not a bright barrage like in her father’s studio. She instinctively covers the scars over her stomach, but Camellia pulls her hands away.

“Don’t do that,” she says, and the girl hears the camera click twice. Eyes closed, skin moist from sweat, the girl looks like a guest at a Bacchanal, napping until her next bout of dancing and revelry. Camellia says, “Open your eyes,” and the girl sees her standing there, leaning like a willow over a hot sidewalk.

Camellia kisses the girl, kisses the freckled mouth she inherited from her father, the photographer. As Camellia licks and kisses her breasts, her ribcage, her stomach, the girl moves to cover her scars again. They are an angry shade of pink and still sore even though they are over a year old.

“What did this?” Camellia asks. She puts her lips over the cellophane skin of the largest scar, right over the girl’s hip. She tells Camellia she was ill, that she had an operation.

“But you’re well now, yes?” Camellia asks. For now, the girl says.

They make love in the dark, rolling over petals until they crush into the fabric draped over the floor, no longer petals at all.

 

#

Months later, the photograph of the girl covered in petals appears in a little-known magazine along with an advertisement for Camellia’s first gallery show. The photograph is in color, the pink of the flowers and the girl’s scars evoking awe in even the most stolid of the attendees. She wonders if the girl will appear among the guests. On the night of the opening, she sees the photographer who knew her as a model, but not the girl, his daughter. Camellia wears a pink flower in her hair and drinks champagne with artists and writers and critics. She does not speak to the photographer, who spends the evening in front of the picture of his daughter who he still thinks is the most beautiful girl because he made her from thin air.