Tags: adult | model | Slovaks

In a rented flat in a tree-lined section of Vinohrady two beautiful women stand poised before me with hands on each others hips...

Over the course of the next half hour Charles Lightfoot, a photographer from LA, will suggest different positions for these two women to be placed in as he also suggests stages of undress.

Kiki Klement, was a Penthouse Pet in the Croatian edition when just 18. After she finishes the shoot she went home to do her homework for gymnazium (high school). She is very petite and seems slightly intimidated posing with the more Amazonian beauty she is paired with.

Her face is coached into provocative poses and, helped along with copious amounts of makeup, she manages to pull off the role of depraved little pupil studying under the older task-masker. But her chicken legs tell the story of her age and the uncorrupted dark hair of her womanhood seems to me like a shooting star, fleeting and ephemeral.

She is a little nervous because she is new to the business and she is working with one of its stars. Kyla Cole has only been modeling for three years but her rise has been meteoric, capped by a month as a Penthouse Pet in March of 2000. Kyla knows the drills and helps Kiki along.

We are supposed to believe that this scene took place spontaneously, a tutoring session that was interrupted by forbidden passions between two women. But each shot is the carefully selected work of Charles, with the occasional suggestion of Adrian, the two girl's agent, who punctuates his instructions and cajoling in Czech with constant fumblings with his cell phone. The poses get more and more explicit until lips are on nipples and tongues graze clits.

Afterwards the two girls break, passionless. Kiki scampers off to another room to change while Kyla puts on her red kimono robe with the slightly perturbed grace of the overworked star she is. Soon Adrian is driving little Kiki home and helping Charles return rented photography equipment and I have some time alone with Kyla.

Kyla has a persistent cough. She tells me that she was shooting at night on a Croatian beach and she caught a cold. I'm interested but my questions are a ruse. Kyla's eyes. I'm hiding from her eyes for a moment.

Dim lights Download Embed Embed this video on your site

We met earlier, shook hands and she looked at me but that was before the shoot, her thoughts were elsewhere. Now we are sitting together and she has trained those eyes on me and they are like nothing I've ever seen. Like flaming sunlight reflected off a purple sea, they are blinding. It is not an intelligence that is behind them; it is a cagey instinct of summation that helps her establish boundaries.

And Kyla gives me her boundaries.

She is not going to talk about her real name, nor will she say which village in Slovakia she is from. I'm sure I can get this information on the internet but for the moment that's not important.

"You're talking to Kyla Cole right now", is what she says and I understand. It's the same thing as when Charles mentions to her at the beginning of the shoot that she and Kiki can decide how "hard" to go and Kyla says "like normal". Kyla has established boundaries.

She poses nude and she'll do "pink and one finger in", girl-girl shoots such as today but no man-woman stuff ("I don't do porn," she says to this). But while these boundaries are important for me to understand her and her work, it is the walls that she puts up in our conversation that are the real obstacles that I'm trying to understand and overcome.

I throw out some of the myths of this land. Are Western men really more charming then men from the Czech or Slovak Republics? "They are the same all over the world," she tells me.

"World", sounds like "Vorld" and it occurs to me that how this woman says things might be more important than anything she ever says. Perhaps that produces her measured answers; she knows this. The meaning is unimportant, it is the messenger and her methods that count.

What about men's reactions to her? I get a tepid reply that doesn't tell me how it must really be to receive the level of attention that Kyla probably receives simply by walking among the masses. She says she will smile and chat with anyone. "What if a man walks up to you with a watch on his hand but asks you the time?"

"I will tell him the time," she replies calmly as if dispensing ancient wisdom. Kyla Cole, Bodhisattva supermodel.

A similar story in what she looks for in men. While it's refreshing that she says that she values being able to talk to a man more than his looks she is obviously not letting me penetrate the area that holds her heart, her secret desires, not matter how hard I probe. I try making her laugh. I engage her intellectually. I goad her patriotism. But I get the same jaded calmness, the Press Spokeswoman answers. Finally I get her to agree to go to a pub downstairs with me for a beer, though she is not very enthusiastic.

In the confines of a Hospoda, with a golden pilsner in front of her, Kyla's walls slowly came down. "Beer. God, I love beer," she says, a small mustache of foam momentarily on her pursed lips before she licks it off.

Slightly stunned by her statement and the quicksilver of her tongue I take a long pull on my beer and collect myself. Did she just say that?

She continues confessing her deep affection for Czech beer. She has been approached to do an advertisement for a small Czech brewery (I teach her the word "brewery" and watch her digest it with it's product) and intends to do it for no money, only beer.

A Czech country band plays in the other room, smoke wafts over to our table into Kyla's cascading mane of straight hair. The waitress, a chunky girl with drooping jowls, comes over and takes our order of more beer from Kyla. Tables around us are full of men with beards and beer bellies with their bloated women cuddled into them. They hang posters of Kyla in the workroom and talk lewdly about her endowments among themselves.

Kyla begins to muse on the "dangers of beauty". Men, of course, only wanting one thing is to be expected with a woman like Kyla but she tells me of being burned by friendships where that friend would only want to be seen with her.

The double-intentions of everyone around her and what they want from her. Suddenly my exasperation at her previously measured answers fades and, safely for a moment on the other side, I respect those walls and the sense of place they give her. Her world is one of shadows where there are usually agenda's from each person. She tells me that she prefers the friendships of men. They are easier to understand.

"The beauty is good for to make your life more easy. But sometimes it's very dangerous... Sometimes it turns out that men like you just because of your looks. Even in friendship. They take something from your beauty to help them."

These agenda's are impossibly unlike Kyla. She is a simple and spontaneous spirit. Two years ago she was 20 and she went over the apartment of a man she had started dating. He had pictures of beautiful women all over his walls and she thought to herself "I want to be like them."

And with the snap of a finger she was. She found an agent and a few months later she was shooting with Stephen Hicks in America and talking with Penthouse. (N.B. Kyla has a heated dispute with Hicks as he registered the domain name kylacole.com and claims that he invented her name, a claim she heatedly disputes.)

But beauty has its limits. It hasn't found her that ideal man yet, though she wants to be married at 25 and a mother by 27. It wasn't able to get her a new visa to the U.S. to support Penthouse's offer to be Pet of the Year. Later that night I would think about the limits of beauty, how misplaced its force is in this world, how ironic it can be, when I talk with a journalist friend about how Mohammed Atta was able to get a visa to the U.S. but Kyla Cole was not.

I'm having a back and forth with this woman, an actual conversation, no longer unnerved by the simple fact of her beauty or stymied by her lack of intellect. I am no longer comparing her beauty to other rare and exquisite creatures of this earth but rather finally engaged with her as a person.

Now I find myself just talking with a woman who has little to fall back on and who therefore finds her life and destiny is in the hands of something that she has very little control over. Suddenly we are joined by Charles, his assistant Shawna and Adrian. We are talking about Kyla's roles in Andrew Blake movies, her shooting with Playmate Victoria Ztrok and her work on Danny's Hard-drive.

Kyla is still sipping her beer but the focus of her lasers is now back on "shock and stun". The window of time I could see through the dramatic blue of her beauty and visit it, visit her, has closed, like a prison gate closing, and I am again on the other side of those imposing walls.