We shot our young wives in the sitting room.
          Years later, after they had grown tired of us being boyish in a bad way, remarks were made.
          “They wouldn’t have looked as beautiful had anyone else shot them,” he shouted from the bathroom. An initial wave of horror, followed closely by a wave of embarrassment, rushed over me when I went to the bathroom and saw what he was referring to. He had neglected to pull his pants up. His boxers were plain white, but dingy.
          The picture was taped up on the mirror. It was a simple black and white that was yellowing and curling at the edges. The humidity in the bathroom hadn’t helped matters any. There was a patch of pristine white border that had been preserved by the scrap of tape I used to hang it. I had long since misplaced the negative.
          It was true; our love or lust or drunken enthusiasm had somehow imbued the photographs themselves. But it was also true that they probably would’ve looked fine had anyone else shot them.
          Catherine was sitting sideways, her legs folded over the armrest at the knees, in the high backed yellow chair. Every piece of wooden furniture in that place had something or other carved into its legs. Catherine’s uncle Dom, a local politico and restaurateur, had moved down to Florida that spring due to illness and we moved out to his musty mansion all the way down Rodger’s Road by the golf course. Bobby and Joanie drove out nearly every night in that piece of shit Scottsdale of his. We spent the nights in that sitting room with the red plaid carpet getting drunk on Uncle Dom’s wine, smoking the dope Catherine had planted in the garden, trying to convince the girls to pose nude.
          We could hardly contain our giddiness that night as the girls slid their cut-offs down their legs and kicked them off to the side. We photographed our own wives. Joanie went first. She assumed a classic position lying on the sofa. She was the first woman, besides Catherine, I had ever seen completely naked. I remember she didn’t immediately put her clothes back on, but she did round the corner to pull her shorts up. Her little triangle shaped butt was the same tone of light brown as the back of her legs, on account of some nude sun bathing that had taken place out by the pool when the girls thought we were shagging balls from the seventh hole water hazard.
          It is true that Bobby and I took some other, less organized, nudes on that day. We took turns doing cannon balls into the seventh hole water hazard for appearance’s sake. Our young wives had managed to get their clothes on by the time we came whistling up the footpath with our cameras in one hand and our tripods in the other.
          Then it was Catherine’s turn with the high backed yellow chair. Catherine was hesitant at first, but when she saw the attentiveness with which Bobby shot Joanie she cracked that little smile of hers. She was standing at the edge of the sitting room, naked, holding a glass of wine and a joint in the same hand. Her sharp thin frame looked soft in the light: various points along her body that usually looked jagged with protruding bones had been annihilated by the darkness.
          When Joanie went into the corridor to pull up her pants, Catherine took a seat in the high backed yellow chair. We tried several poses: straight ahead with her legs crossed, straight ahead with her legs uncrossed, straight ahead with her arms folded in front of her, straight ahead with her arms at her sides, and finally sideways.
          I wanted to ask him what happened to the companion piece to my photograph, but I turned the TV on instead. Bobby and I didn’t really say much the rest of the night until Bobby said he thought he ought to go.
          It is true that, without so much as opening a window, the moment Bobby left I took the photograph down from the mirror and lit it on fire with my Zippo. The photo burst into blue flame that nearly touched my chin. I held the photo, watching it burn for a second, before placing it in the big amber colored ashtray in the living room. I had to get up on a stool to take the battery out of the smoke detector. It is also true that in the morning I rooted around in the ashtray with the business end of a Number 2 pencil looking for remnants.