It's a Saturday and I didn't have plans. Mostly I've been somewhat underwhelmed -- it's good, but it reads like the Oprah's Book Club selection that it is -- but there was this one passage...
Dante's envelope sat in the laundry basket amongst the whites. I picked it up and peeled back the flap as carefully as possible.The Polaroid pictures were in a separate, smaller envelope paper-clipped to the back of his letter—five snapshots of him, standing and sitting, completely naked.
Their starkness immobilized me. His hands were on his hips in one. In another, they reached up behind his neck so that his arms, bent at the elbow, formed wings. His pubic hair, the hair beneath his arms, looked black and blunt against the whiteness of his body—a glowing whiteness, as if he had somehow been lit from within.
The letter explained how he'd locked the door while his roommate was at class and placed the camera on a pile of books on a chair. "Not making love to you that night was the biggest mistake I've ever made in my life. It's all I can think about. I'm hoping these pictures deepen our commitment to each other. I TRULY TRULY love you."
I recalled that altered picture I'd come upon in my seventh-grade religion ook at St. Anthony's School—how that surprise dirty picture had both shocked and informed me. Yet there was nothing pornographic about Dante's Polaroids. His face, cut off at the forehead in some of the shots, had the same struggling expression as his graduation portrait—almost a holy look. It was clear from the way he'd posed that he was offering his body, requesting—not pushing and ripping like Pig Jack Speight. "All men are pigs," I'd said to Ruth that morning. "No they're not," she'd replied. In one of the pictures, Dante was seated on the edge of the bed, holding himself down there, offering it, somehow politely.
That struggling face: I thought of another picture—the one hanging in the parlor at Grandma's: Jesus, his sad eyes looking out into your eyes, his sacred heart exposed. Beseeching: a word from a prayer I'd once memorized. Dante's face beseeched me.
I'm surprised anyone verbalized that. I know what he means. I'm impressed.
