The night before Jack came for dinner we had had families around for a barbecue.
After the meal, the photo albums had come out for the usual laughs, memories and so on. We have about 20 of them, albums that is, not families, neatly maintained by me. I am not a bad semi-amateur photographer and looking after the family snapshots has fallen to me. My wife, Erica, though also has her own album in which she has her "special" photos.
These include baby shots, family photos, graduation days and so on. And unknown to me until she brought it out on our family night, she had included the tame-ish first photo of one of our own "private shoots".
Now these I should tell you a bit about. Over the years, as my interests in photography developed (great pun eh?) I've picked up a bit of equipment and helped out at mate's weddings and so on, or done local sports teams. I've done a few portraits, landscapes and the odd artistic shot, flowers through raindrops, that sort of thing.
And there's another string to my bow hitherto known only to my wife, and me or as Royalty might say, my wife and I. Hitherto? Well we'll get to that eventually.
When the wine has flowed some nights, Erica and I would set up the lights and my backdrops, get out the cameras and have a bit of fun. She would put on some of her more elegant clothes or dress to a theme and then slowly, frame by frame, get naked. It was always tasteful and glamorous but even so, before digital I would sheepishly take the film to the late night chemist in the centre of town.
The girls there would always give me a knowing smile when I came back an hour later, but what the heck, you're only embarrassed for 30 seconds and you've got the rest of your life to look at the pictures.
Anyway, the next night, when Jack arrived for dinner, most of the albums had been put away, but not Erica's.
For some reason it had been left on the sideboard in the dining room.
Dinner, cooked by Erica and washed down with expensive wines bought by both Jack and I, came and went and we started chatting and carrying on as we always did.
Jack was an old mate of mine from school. He was best man at our wedding and I was best man at his, but his marriage had busted up under the duress of his travel.
He was a charmer and found female company where ever he went in the world on business. The rest was inevitable. Jan, his wife, our friend, too, put up with it for longer than she needed to, then quietly left one day.
They're still friends, go out to dinner together, occasionally bonk each other if both are a bit short of companionship at the same time, but all now without the hang-ups of marriage. There were no children, so the pain was lesser than it might have been, though we know they both felt lost and bewildered for a while, particularly as Erica and I were rock solid. Still we stayed friends with both of them.
Unknown to them, we too could have our moments, but never anything irreparable. I got a bit too close to a female colleague at work and almost ended up in strife. I told Erica the full story - there was a bit of kissing and cuddling in the storeroom over a couple of weeks - she didn't speak to me for two days, and then it was forgotten about until she had to make a small confession to me.
Tiddly, very in fact, at a work party, she had danced on the boardroom table and done a striptease.
"It kind of just happened," she said. "It was a great party. Then someone said the only thing missing was the entertainment and I thought I would be it. I can't sing, I can't do stand up comedy, so what else was there?"
I said so they saw your tits, big deal.
There was a silence, then came: "Ummm, there was a little bit more!"
Did I really want to know?
The choice was not mine: "I was really in some weird place in my mind, I liked being undressed and I liked the power it gave me. I had them all, women and men, watching me. Once my top came off, I didn't want the moment to stop, so I took off my skirt and then climbed down and did a couple of lap dances.
"I think my tits were grabbed at least a couple of times. At least by the two directors who gave me $100 notes tucked into my g-string. Then I withdrew to the toilet, pulled myself together and went back into the room like nothing had happened.
"It was agreed we were all adults, it was a party, and let's get on with work the next day.
"I hope you can feel the same."
I thought if that's the worst that happens in a long marriage, you aren't doing so badly. No body is perfect, well expect maybe for Erica's body, which is in my humble estimation, very close to perfect.
Which is why I enjoy photographing her getting naked. What the heck I thought if someone else had the same thrill for a few minutes ... and paid her.
"Forgiven, but not forgotten," I said. I was proud that my wife had been the centre of such attention. For that reason, I'd often wondered about showing our photos to others, but had thought better of it.
Back to Jack and our night with him. We were about to switch from white wine to red and he went to the sideboard for fresh glasses while I decantered.
He saw the photo album, Erica's special one, and opened it up.
"Ahhhhhh who was a pretty baby then," he laughed, flicking through the pages?
Then, "and who's still a pretty babe, eh?"
Obviously, he had come to the last photo, the start of our private shoot.
"They call this a glamour photo in the trade, don't they," he said, with a big wink.
"Who did you get to do this shot for you?'
"I did them, it," I said, my pride muddling up the answer.
"Them?"
Oh dear!
"There are more," said Jack?
"A few," I murmured.
"Don't be so shy," said Erica slapping me gently on the wrist. "There are heaps and you know there are and they're great!"
Turning to Jack, she continued: "He's a very good photographer and I get a real buzz out of posing for him."
"I never said he wasn't a good photographer," said Jack, "or that you wouldn't make a good subject either. I don't suppose there any chance of a bloke seeing a few more of them?"
I looked at Erica.
"Can't see any problems," she said, "nothing Jack hasn't seen before after we spent that day with Jan at the beach all those years ago."
Oh yes, the nude beach in the national park, bollocky naked the four of us, playing tag in the water. Some interesting bits got tagged, too, from memory, or mammary.
"If you insist," I said, keen to show off some of my work if not my wife's naked body.
I disappeared into where I kept the photos and came back to a conspiracy of smiles and silence.
"What's up," I said.
"Nothing," came the replies in telling unison.
I pulled the photos from the envelope and spread them out.
"Very nice," said Jack, looking at the ones in which Erica had dressed as a librarian, hair in a bun, glasses on, then slowly undressed, letting her hair down, the whole sexy, schoolboy cliché.
We'd also done a gangster series with a toy machine gun. Jack was mightily impressed.
"We've had a few good nights over the years," said Erica. "I usually come up with the themes, you know from something I saw on the telly or in a magazine.
"There's one though I've never, well never really mentioned ... "
Jack and I looked at each other quizzically.
"Yes," I said? "What are you on about?"
Erica smirked. "All right," she said. "You know that album cover Janet Jackson did, the one where she's topless but her breasts are covered by someone else's hands, I, well, I once saw it in the record store and thought that would be kind of fun to do. I thought you could do it with a time delay on the camera and sneak around behind me and get the shot."
"That wouldn't work," I said. "You'd need to be at the camera to make sure all the angles were right."
"Well, I could offer a spare set of hands," said Jack, mostly as a joke, I think.
"Very funny," I said.
"Very good suggestion," said Erica. "Wanna do it, I'm up for it if anyone else is?"
Now you think a lot of things at moments like these. Like no way am I letting him grab my wife's tits for starters. But there was also the thought of how good the shot would be, setting it up, getting the light right. I was way ahead of myself before I knew it. I think it had as much to do with the wine as anything else. So while a huge part of me strained to say no, and all this happening in a nanosecond, I felt a lot of other forces at play, such that I said nothing.
My silence was taken by Erica as affirmation.
"Okay, I guess it's on with the show if Jack's okay with it," she said.
"Well if Evan is, I guess it's okay," he said.
To say no now would have been to wimp out wouldn't it, Gentle Reader?
"Jack, can you help me with the gear," I said, still with my head swimming with too many permutations to think about, his hands, my wife's breasts, get the lighting right, it will be on digital so nobody at the Chemists will see it ... his hands on Erica's breasts ... around and around it all went.
As well as grabbing the gear, I asked Jack to check out the original shot with me on the Internet.
I think it dawned on us both then really what we were doing.
"You sure you're okay with this," he asked?
"Too late now, if I said no now we'd have bloody world war three on us," I said.
"Once you say yes to Erica, there's no going back."
I thought I saw a smile on Jack's face when I said that, a glint in his eye that said he understand better than I knew, but maybe no. And there wasn't much room in my spinning brain for another weird thought about what that might be all about.
As we set up, I refilled wine glasses. I needed a shot of courage; I thought the others might have, too.
