Chapter 31
Ingrid Prince realized that the white walls in every Prince family home created a diorama effect. People watched from the outside, studying, deducing, then leaving, even after brief encounters, with lasting judgements. Ingrid Prince, the beautiful, radiant wife! Robert Prince, the handsome, wealthy husband, a man of fine stock!
Oh, what they see … and don’t see.
Ingrid closed her eyes.
I am safe. I am safe. I am safe.
‘Close those beautiful cat eyes, Ingrid, and say it three times. “It” is wherever you want to take us. I am Tahiti. I am Tahiti. I am Tahiti. Then – bam! – eyes open – bam! – I shoot!’
She could hear Sandro Cera’s voice in her head as he stalked around her all those years ago. Handsome, talented, orphan, immigrant Sandro Cera, the rags-to-riches-and-back fashion photographer; Ingrid Prince, at his feet, blonde, tanned, extended on the white floor of a freezing studio in Brooklyn, shivering by a faulty space heater.
Camera in hand, Sandro would rise up onto the balls of his feet, crouch down, close in, create distance, his body twisting and turning as if he was the one to be captured.
Ingrid did as he asked, closed her eyes, used his three-times trick.
‘No lips moving!’ Sandro said. No leeps. ‘These are thoughts I’m talking about. Three times, sweets, three times: I am silent, I am silent, I am silent!’
‘My teeth are chattering is why my lips are moving!’ said brave, bold, new-girl Ingrid, just turned seventeen. ‘I’m fucking hypothermic … times three.’
Click flash click flash click flash. And the photo that made them both famous was the one that was taken just afterwards, as Ingrid laughed, her head thrown back, then forward, the lens capturing a warm and beautiful smile with no Brooklyn ice, just St Tropez, St Tropez, St Tropez.
It was a different world. It was New York in the Nineties – when they partied below ground and cauterized their hearts’ wounds
