Shutterbabe

by Deborah Copaken Kogan

  “Yes,” I answer. “I’m a photographer with Gamma, here to cover the rhino war.”

  The Times reporter laughs. “I wouldn’t exactly call it a war,” he says. “I mean, they have guns and all, but I don’t really think they know what the hell they’re doing up there. You covered any other wars?”

  I brag a little, pretending to be a real veteran. “Oh sure. Israel, Afghanistan, I’ve been around . . .”

  The men, in turn, pretend to be impressed. “Uh-huh,” they say, “is that right?” but I can tell they’d rather get back to the much better discussion they were having before I interrupted.

  I change the subject, getting right to the point. “Listen,” I say, “Julian, uh . . .”

  “Ken,” says the man from the Times.

  “Right. Ken. I have a bit of a problem.” I tell them about my quandary with Nduku, trying to make light of the situation. The two of them laugh nervously, their expressions having turned from disinterested to sympathetic.

  “Welcome to Africa,” says Julian.

  “Yeah, I don’t know what to tell you,” says Ken.

  Julian takes another sip of his beer then pipes up with an idea. He says he knows a local journalist who covered Operation Stronghold and who might be able to offer some advice. He doesn’t have the phone number on him, but he suggests I accompany him back to his house, where we could dig up the guy’s business card and call him.

  We say our good-byes to Ken and drive off together in Julian’s white, slightly dented Ford hatchback toward the residential section of the city. To get there, we have to meander through busy downtown streets and outdoor markets alive with local Zimbabweans, some coming in and out of office buildings in Western clothing, others wearing richly colored batik cloths cinched around waists, wrapped around hair and draped over ebony shoulders. Most of the women have either a baby or small toddler strapped onto their backs with yet another one of these batik cloths, which they expertly tie and untie without breaking stride. A few of the babies are positioned in front, happily suckling at their mothers’ breasts.

  As we drive farther out, the terrain flattens, the jacaranda trees sprout skyward in neat rows and the batik cloths disappear. Here, in the residential section of south Harare, blond, pigtailed children ride bikes on the streets and frolic on well-manicured lawns with pink-flowered walkways and delicate fountains carved from stone.

  “Still pretty segregated, huh?” I say to Julian. It’s 1989. The civil war in Rhodesia, which began in the mid-1960s, had ended over seven years earlier.

  “Sort of,” he says, turning onto a quiet side street. “This used to be an all-white working-class neighborhood. Now some blacks have moved in. Anyway, here we are.”

  Julian parks in his driveway, but before he can even step out of the car, a small, rangy mutt runs out of the house and jumps into his arms, greeting him with an eager tongue and gales of puppy laughter. “This is Pablo,” he says, holding out a paw for me to shake. “Pablo the puppy, named after the Cuban embassy political attaché, if you can believe it. He keeps me from getting too lonely.” He stares at the puppy as he speaks, daring to let his blue eyes make contact with mine for a brief second, until he reaches the word “lonely.” Though I resist the urge, something about the combination of that glance and the word and the accent and the blue and the air and the sun makes me want to lick Julian’s face, too.

  We walk into the house, a modest yet airy structure whose bottom half he rents. Julian tells me to make myself at home on the floor of the sitting room—“I haven’t really gotten around to furniture yet,” he shouts—while he rifles through the disorganized mess on his desk down the hallway. I look around at the few decorative touches he’s made: a black and blue Lesotho blanket hanging from a stone wall, a colorful Swaziland flag on the opposite wall, lots of haphazardly placed floor cushions, a rough-hewn wooden chair. I grab an old Economist from a pile of many and settle down to read on a large cushion in the corner of the room. A few minutes later I can hear Julian speaking on the phone, but the friend must be doing most of the talking because mostly I just hear a bunch of Uh-huh’s and Right, I see’s. Then he says, “A small prop plane, is it? Okay, then. Appreciate it. Right. Cheers,” and hangs up the phone.

  He comes back into the living room and plops down next to me on the floor. His legs are long, and he bends them into two khaki mountains, resting his elbows on his knees while holding his reporter’s notebook between the two peaks. “Okay, I have the information,” he says. “Here’s what you need to do.”

  He tells me there’s a local bus that can get me to Victoria Falls, a popular tourist sight on the Zambezi River where I won’t have any problem finding lodging. He suggests that, because I’m a woman traveling alone, public transportation would be my safest and easiest option. Once I get to Vic Falls, any number of hotels should be able to help me arrange an inexpensive private flight to a small airstrip servicing the Mana Pools game reserve, a few miles from the base camp of the antipoaching squad.

  “You see?” he says, ripping the piece of paper from its metal spiral and handing it to me. “Problem solved.” I feel a pleasant jolt when Julian’s hand accidentally brushes mine in the exchange, and I notice he smells nice, like soap. “Oh, and once you’re there, ask for some chap named Mark. He’s both the commander of Operation Stronghold and the chief warden of the park. The whole trip shouldn’t take you more than three days or so, counting the bus travel and the day or two it’ll take you to organize the charter flight. Do you like tuna fish?”

  “Why? Do I need to bring some?”

  “No, no.” Julian laughs. “I was thinking of making some for dinner. Would you care to join me?”

  “Sure. Yes. That would be nice,” I answer. I fold the piece of paper with the notes on it and stick it in the back pocket of my jeans. “Uh, Julian,” I say, “thanks. For being so nice, I mean. You know, restoring my faith in mankind.”

  “Ah, well,” he laughs again, “when you taste my tuna salad, you might change your mind about that.” He opens two beers for us to drink while he makes the sandwiches. As he’s stirring in the mayonnaise, with his back turned to me he says, “So Afghanistan, that must have been some trip.”

  “Oh, yeah,” I say, slipping once again into brag mode. “It was horrible. We were stuck in the mountains for weeks. I got a piece of shrapnel in my hand and . . .” But I slow and stop.

  “Yes, shrapnel,” says Julian, still stirring, “and so?”

  “You know what, Julian? Forget the shrapnel. It was small, came right out. You want to know why Afghanistan was so horrible? There was this guy . . .” For the first time since getting back from Peshawar, I tell the full and complete story of Pascal. I tell Julian how I fell for him, how handsome and flirtatious and exciting he was, how badly I was beaten and duped by him, how he faked his photographs, how he left me alone to fend for myself.

  “What an asshole,” says Julian. “Here, grab the beers, let’s eat dinner outside in the garden while it’s still light.”

  We head to the backyard, where we sit down on some wooden lawn furniture, our paper plates on our laps, our beer bottles balanced on the slats between our knees. The early evening mosquitoes are out, everything looks orange and though the tuna sandwiches are bland, just as Julian had promised they’d be, the night has a magical, anticipatory feel to it, like an orchestra warming up. Julian is staring straight into the fading sun, taking a swig of his beer to wash down a bite of food. “So he beat you with a telephone receiver, and then he went inside Afghanistan without you?”

  That Oxbridge accent slays me.

  “Yeah,” I say, slightly embarrassed at having poured my heart out to a stranger. “I don’t know why I just told you that. I haven’t really told anyone that.”

  “I’m a good listener,” he says, smiling. “Besides, I don’t charge by the hour.”

  I laugh, but then I
open up even further, tell him about the rabbi who kissed me, about getting mugged, about lots of important things I usually keep private. As the sun finally sinks below the horizon, we sit in silence for a minute or so, side by side on our lawn chairs, listening to the crickets, eating tuna, both staring straight ahead at the darkening shadows on the jacaranda trees. Pablo the puppy runs around the grass, spending equal time furiously digging and running back to Julian for another pat on the head. When he goes back to his digging, I put down my plate and bottle on my chair and walk over to Julian. I sit down on the edge of his chair, my left thigh touching the side of his knee, and face him. I want to say something original, but as I lean over, just slightly, just to gauge his reaction, all I can manage is a banal “I like you.”

  Julian recoils. “I like you, too,” he says, but it comes out more like a question than a statement of fact.

  I immediately go back to sit on my chair. “I’m sorry,” I say. “I misread the situation.”

  “Please, please,” he replies, now sitting up to face me. “It’s not that.” There’s a long, awkward pause and much nervous hand-wringing before he speaks again. Then he tells me about the girlfriend, the one who is coming to Harare to visit him. But the details seem sketchy, perhaps even made up for the benefit of my ego. Trying to ease the tension, I smile and tell him I’ve never known that to stop any man before. Julian laughs nervously and looks at the ground. Then he says that just means I’ve been hanging out with the wrong kind of men. “Look, Deborah, you’re very young—”

  I interrupt him. “You don’t have to make any more excuses,” I say. “I got it.” I want to crawl into one of those holes puppy Pablo is digging.

  “I’m not making excuses. And I’m not talking about age as a measure of years,” he says, now staring at his fidgeting hands. “I mean young. Still trying to prove yourself. Trusting people you shouldn’t trust.” He finally looks me in the eye. “Think of it this way. When I’m covering a war, I can always tell who the first-time journalists are. They’re the ones who run straight into the fray, not thinking. But when you’re right in the middle of the action, you can’t see anything at all. You have no perspective. Worst of all, you can get hurt. Badly. The more seasoned journalists know this. They hang back, they watch the situation develop, they run away if need be. Do you understand the analogy I’m trying to draw?”

  “Uh-huh.” I’m humiliated. Not only have I just been rejected, I’ve been psychoanalyzed, categorized and exposed for the green journalist I am. Julian stands up and walks over to my chair to put his arm around me. He tells me he didn’t mean to hurt my feelings or sound pedantic. He pats my head as if I were Pablo and then plants a platonic kiss just above my right ear.

  As we clean up dinner, we engage in a ten-minute conversation about the weather, and then Julian drives me back to my hotel. “Well, then, good luck with those rhinos,” he says as I step out of the car.

  I shut the door and lean into the open window. I thank him for calling his friend, for my tuna-fish dinner, for pointing out my flaws.

  Julian runs his hand through his curly hair and sighs. “We’re all flawed,” he says. He apologizes for lecturing me and fumbles with the key in the ignition. The car makes a loud grinding sound as he accidentally tries to start the already idling engine. He apologizes for this, too, and drives off into the night.

  Back in my room, I crawl into bed, and with Julian’s words still ricocheting in my head, I recall the last time I accepted a dinner invitation from a stranger, barely a month or so earlier.

  He’s right. I am too trusting.

  I MET SEAN AT AN AFTERNOON TEA at Shakespeare & Company, the small yet humbly famous English-language bookstore in Paris that lies just down the quay of the Seine from the Place St. Michel. By this time I was living in my small studio on the rue St. Denis, and because of my constant travel, I had few friends besides Marion. I spent almost every day in Paris alone with my cameras. The Sunday-afternoon teas on the second floor of the overstuffed bookstore became an eagerly anticipated fixture in my otherwise solitary life, and I was pleased that Sean—who was on a two-week vacation and who said he worked in advertising back in the States—wanted to continue our pseudointellectual conversation about Hemingway over dinner.

  Sean was in his mid-thirties, with salt-and-pepper hair setting off his green eyes. He was well read, courteous and charming. We drank an entire bottle of wine, and we held hands during dinner, dreamily watching the pedestrians pass by our outdoor table on the serpentine and picturesque rue Mouffetard—which, because it featured prominently in A Moveable Feast, is where we decided to eat that night. When the sun dropped in the sky, Sean placed his sweater around my shoulders to keep out the evening chill.

  At the time, I was seeing another photographer now and then—an older man, pushing forty, divorced with a five-year-old kid, hyperaware of his own charm—but our visits with each other were mostly afterhours, on a strictly need-to-see basis. Suffice it to say, ours was not a particularly chatty alliance. My friend Chantal, an editor at Sipa, called this a relationship pour l’hygiene—“for hygiene,” which is what made me realize that French women are much more practical about sex than American women. They understand that the urge to copulate is just like the urge to eat or to urinate: strong, natural and necessary for proper personal maintenance. Alas, the guy had been off shooting a story in Chile for almost an entire month by the time I met Sean. I was feeling, for lack of a better word, unhygienic.

  After dinner, Sean and I walked to the Pont des Arts, a wooden pedestrian bridge straddling the Seine. We were leaning over the green, wrought-iron rail, watching the sky turn from pink to dark blue and admiring the Eiffel Tower in the distance, when he leaned over and kissed me. Suddenly, as if charged by our embrace—no joke—the lights on the tower illuminated. Nothing like a brightly lit, giant metal phallus to set the mood. Sean put his arm around me and suggested I accompany him back to his hotel. “Sure,” I said, “let’s go,” and I took his hand in mine.

  Now, I know there aren’t a lot of women who would follow a total stranger back to his hotel room. I’m not one of them. Remember, unlike most women, I also chose to cover wars for a living. I was, in the parlance of a psychiatrist I once met at a cocktail party, a thrill seeker. He explained this had something to do with my neurons and their dopamine receptors, although I glazed over when he tried to elaborate. I say this not as an excuse, but as a means of explanation, and only a partial one at that. While I’m willing to entertain the notion that my dopamine receptors were more needy than other people’s dopamine receptors, I also know that much of my behavior was very conscious and deliberate.

  I was on a personal mission, a crusade against hypocrisy—with all of the self-righteous and blind religious fervor such a task entailed.

  While my feminist forebears had paved the way for me to enter into any profession I chose, and maybe even to receive comparable pay, they had yet to make serious inroads into the sexual double standard between men and women in America. When a man pursues a number of different women, he’s called normal—even a stud. When a woman pursues a number of different men, she’s called a whore. We know this. Unfortunately, we have somehow allowed this dichotomy to become an accepted truth in our repressed society, and we bow to the psychobiologists foisting their Darwinian theories upon us about sperm and natural selection in hunter-gatherer societies to explain why this should and must be so. (If man’s genetic inclination is to spread his sperm, it’s okay for him to sleep around. But woman, O sanctified producer of eggs, dependent upon a single provider, must not.) Never mind that I never bought into any of that crap. (Two words: foraging grandmas.) For a girl just starting to understand her sexual persona, inflamed with seething teenage lust and desire, the idea that her behavior would be judged differently from a boy’s behavior was nothing short of infuriating.

  In my seventh-grade class, there was beautiful girl named Bebe. One
afternoon after school—or so the titillating story goes—Bebe accompanied three of our male classmates to one of their basement rec rooms. There, one at a time, each had his turn with her. The rumors that swirled through the school hallways afterwards were outrageous and contradictory. They said she left her bra on. They said she was naked. They said she only went to second base. They said she had sex with all three. They said she gave head. They said she barfed when one of them tried to make her. The only thing upon which every single kid in that school seemed to agree was that Bebe was a whore. With a Magic Marker, someone wrote the word on her locker, and over the next week this was followed by graffiti ranging from “slut” to “cunt.” In public, she was ostracized, humiliated, loudly insulted and quietly mocked.

  As for the three boys, they became the most popular kids in the school.

  I was outraged. What Bebe did, as far as I was concerned, was bold, brave and exciting. I was so tired of the game playing, the labels, the double standards and the Orwellian double-speak I saw my girlfriends having to resort to, saying no when they meant yes. But the morality tale of Bebe frightened us all. No one wanted to be the next girl to have “slut” written on her locker, even if many of us secretly envied her audacity.

  By the time I hit high school, however, I was fed up. At age sixteen, raging with the hormones of puberty, starving for experience, I cast off my virginity like a pair of dirty socks I’d been wearing for far too long. (His name was Alex, he played defensive tackle, he said he loved me, I said it back, we did it, the earth moved—okay, maybe it just quivered—we cried, it was very nice, I felt relieved, we kept doing it, he left for college.) That taken care of, I jumped from bed to bed with the glee of a frog in a lily pond, gently deflowering boy after gangly teenage boy. Because of what had happened to Bebe, I was careful not to advertise this fact—if people were talking about me, I didn’t want to know about it. And frankly, I was starting not to care. I liked sex, and I figured I should be able to act accordingly. In short, I was playing by the boys’ rules.