When she got home there was a guy.
“Hi, Rebecca,” he said.
“I told you to let me know when you’re coming back here.”
But without even taking off her coat she kissed him.
Later, at night, Rebecca told him she had a new job. I’m posing for a painter, she said.
“You?”
“Yes, me.”
He laughed.
“Nude,” she said.
“Come on.”
“It’s not a bad job. Every day, four hours a day.”
“Shit, why’d you do it?”
“Money. He’s giving me five thousand pounds. We have to pay for the flat somehow. Are you going to do it?”
The guy was a photographer, but not many people seemed disposed to believe it. So Rebecca took care of everything, the rent, the bills, the stuff in the fridge. He every so often disappeared, then he returned. His things were there. Rebecca usually summed up the situation in very elementary terms. I’m in love with a shit, she said.
A couple of months earlier, he had said that a friend of his wanted to take some photographs of her. They arranged to meet one evening, there at her house. They drank a lot and eventually Rebecca found herself naked on the bed, with the friend taking snapshots. At some point her boyfriend the shit undressed and came over to her. They had begun to make love. The friend meanwhile took pictures. Then, for a few days, Rebecca hadn’t wanted to see the shit. But not even then had she stopped loving him.
She knew, besides, that she was destined by her body to ridiculous loves. No man thinks he desires a body like that. But experience had taught Rebecca that, in fact, many desire it, and it’s often the result of some wound they don’t want to admit. Often they are afraid of the female body, without knowing it. Sometimes they need to despise it to get excited, and then possessing that body makes them feel good. Almost always there was a sort of expectation of perversion in the air, as if to choose that anomalous beauty necessarily involved giving up the simpler and more straightforward modes of desire. So, at twenty-seven, Rebecca already had a pile of bad memories, where she would have had a hard time finding the simple sweetness of a clean, pure moment. It didn’t matter to her. There wasn’t much she could do, in that regard.
So she stayed with her shit boyfriend. So she wasn’t surprised when Jasper Gwyn had made her that offer. It was exactly the sort of thing she had learned to expect from life.