Everyone Is Beautiful

by Katherine Center

  At this point in the semester, with only one class to go, I was taking two kinds of photographs. Portraits, for my book about beauty—and I had yet to break the news to Amanda that she was likely too conventionally beautiful for me to include her—and candids, taken both at the park and all over town, as I went on my rounds with the boys in the stroller. The photos I was taking had a snapshot quality to them that gave them a bittersweet feel. Anna Belkin thought they would sell like hotcakes. And she'd take a 10 percent commission.

  Anna Belkin wanted big photographs, so I had to learn how to print them big—and fast. Peter was leaving for the Hamilton Fellowship in just over a week. And once he was gone, it would be all me all the time with the kids. I'd have to do all my work before he left. I'd be way too exhausted after he was gone. I'd been in denial about Peter leaving—by choice. It seemed like the best way. Thinking about his leaving brought up a hurricane of emotions in me: I was proud of him, happy for him, and wanted to support him, but I was also jealous of him, resentful that he got to go off and pursue his interests unfettered, and anxious about how on earth I would manage for that long without him. And, to boot, he was going to be out of town on our anniversary.

  That night in the darkroom, Nelson showed me where the giant plastic tubs were, explained I'd have to fill them on the floor, and helped me mix the chemicals. He had brought a six-pack and came in after hours to help me. I wound up with two-foot-by-two-foot images, printed in black and white with good contrast and a black line around the edge. Nelson was a big fan of the black line. A black line showed you hadn't cropped anything, and he felt like part of taking good photos was framing them right in the moment that you clicked the shutter. Cropping after the fact was basically cheating.

  Nelson was a little irritated at my good fortune.

  “That's how it works, I guess,” he kept saying. “It's all who you know.”

  “It's not all who you know, Nelson,” I said. “If she hadn't liked the photographs, she wouldn't have asked me.”

  We were leaving the darkroom after cleaning up and it was already late. I'd printed all the photos Anna Belkin had room for while Nelson looked on. The next step would be to frame them, which Nelson would also help me with. He had a friend at a framing gallery who would give us some free stuff.

  As we stepped into the revolving door that kept light out of the darkroom, Nelson was saying that he liked my photographs. That he thought I really had something. “You're just one of those people everything always comes easy to,” he said as he pulled the door closed.

  “Nothing comes easy to me, Nelson,” I said. “Except photography.” And just as I said it, we heard a thunk. The revolving door, which usually spun easily around to open up on the other side, had hit something or snagged on something or gone off its track. It was, at any rate, not moving.

  “Hey,” Nelson said. “Hey!”

  It was pitch-black inside, but I could hear Nelson pushing on the handle and banging against the door with his palms. When he couldn't get the door to budge, I started working on it.

  “This thing's a piece of shit,” Nelson said.

  I didn't respond. I was pushing on the handle with all my body weight.

  “It's very flimsy,” Nelson insisted. “I bet we could stab our way out with a pencil or something.”

  I wasn't good in emergencies. I wasn't a quick thinker. But, after we ‘d had a few minutes of standing next to each other in total blackness, I said, “MacGyver? Do you have a cell phone?”

  It turns out he did, and we called Maintenance, who said they were sending someone right over.

  We sat on the floor and waited, and Nelson kept trying to hand me his beer bottle for sips. “No thanks again, Nelson,” I kept saying.

  Nelson told me about a photography show he'd been to earlier that week for a woman who took pictures of plastic hula-girl dolls in different locations around the world. He said he hadn't expected to like them, but one photo in particular—a hula girl on the dashboard of a car in a snowstorm—had brought tears to his eyes, though he couldn't say why.

  As Maintenance took their sweet time, Nelson said he had something else to tell me.

  “I'm interested in somebody,” he said.

  “Someone other than your ex-wife?”

  “Someone other than my ex-wife.”

  “That's great, Nelson,” I said.

  “Except for one thing,” he said.

  “What's that?”

  “She doesn't like me.”

  “She doesn't like you romantically, or she doesn't like you at all?”

  Nelson paused for a long time. Then he said, “She doesn't like me at all.”

  Half an hour later, we were out. It turned out that the door was so stuck, Maintenance had to take it apart to get us out. I wondered what I would say to Peter when I got home. He ‘d surely want to know why I was so late. I felt bad, as I puttered home in the Subaru with the heater blasting, about worrying him. And I found myself wishing over and over that I could have been trapped all that time in a tiny dark space with Peter. But there was no way, of course, that I could have been that lucky.

  When I walked into our bedroom, he was lying awake in the dark.

  “Where the hell have you been?” he asked, sitting up. “It's one in the morning.”

  “I got trapped in the revolving door,” I said, heading to the dresser to find some PJs.

  It was really late. I knew that. Peter didn't have to tell me all the things that were wrong with me coming home after the whole city had gone to bed. I could have been dead. I could have been hurt. I should, at the very least, have called.

  “I thought you were asleep,” I said, pulling a T-shirt over my head.

  But the truth was, I hadn't thought he was asleep. I hadn't really thought about him much at all until I was driving home. I had just been thinking about me. I had forgotten to be thoughtful. I felt a little guilty about it, and that must have played into my answer somehow when he asked about what had happened. “You got trapped in the revolving door?”

  “Yes,” I said. “It froze, and I had to wait for Maintenance to take it off the tracks.” There was really no reason that I didn't mention that Nelson had been in there with me, other than I knew that Peter wouldn't like it. And I knew Nelson had liked it. And with one week before Peter left for the fellowship, I didn't want to fight. I just wanted to crawl in next to him and turn off the light. I felt guilty for a lot of things these days—from being a tired mama for my kids, to the piles of laundry that I hadn't quite gotten to—but one thing I felt guilty for that I hadn't thought about until just that moment was that, on some level that really shouldn't have meant anything, I was enjoying Nelson's little crush on me. It was just nice to feel like a person someone—anyone—would have a crush on.

  “You were trapped in there alone?”

  Of course Peter would ask this question. And now, in that one almost imperceptible moment, without ever intending to, I'd accidentally given Peter something to worry about.

  “No,” I said. “I wasn't alone. My photography teacher was trapped in there, too.”

  Peter took that in. “Okay,” he said. “And what's her name?”

  I climbed into bed and pulled up the sheets. “His name,” I said, “is Nelson. And he's the goofball at the gym in the flip-flops.”

  Peter thought about it. “I've never seen anybody in flip-flops at the gym.”

  It made sense that Peter wouldn't have noticed Nelson. The two weren't even in the same league.

  Chapter 23

  The photographs were printed, pressed, framed, and finally ready for hanging on the night before Peter was leaving for California, which also happened to be the Night of Romance I'd been planning for weeks. I had picked up a bottle of champagne and, in a tribute to Amanda's ingenuity, gift-wrapped a little box of naughty kitchen utensils as a thanks-for-the-surgery, glad-you're-all-better, let's-get-down-and-dirty, hold-on-tight-and-enjoy-the-ride après-operation gift. My plan was to get him a
little tipsy, thank him earnestly for being such a great man, and spend the rest of the night doing things to him that would make it impossible for him to forget me while he was gone. Amanda had been coaching me for weeks, and I was ready to take him down.

  I was intending to get the photos up fast and get home. Nelson picked me up outside my apartment in the Extension School art van, and I promised Peter I'd be back in an hour. Nelson had already loaded the photos up himself, and I worried quietly on the drive over that he might have dropped, cracked, or otherwise ruined them. But he had insisted on doing it all. He didn't charge me for his time, but I had paid for it. I'd paid for it all semester in conversation—listening endlessly to stories about his ex-wife, who he was now stalking a little bit, but not in a scary way, just in a sad, sitting-outside-her-house-in-his-car, watching-her-do-dishes-through-the-mini-blinds way. On the way to the café, Nelson told me she'd just thrown out her old pair of yellow dish gloves in exchange for some that were sky blue, which was his favorite color.

  “I love to watch her do the dishes,” he said. “She's so efficient.”

  “Nelson,” I said. “You need to take up swing dancing or start playing golf or teach yourself macrame. Do not park outside your ex-wife's house.”

  “I only do it while I eat,” he said. Then he gave a shrug. “You gotta eat, right?”

  “Take a cooking class, Nelson,” I said. “Get cable. Go after that girl who doesn't like you.”

  Outside of class, and not counting imaginary conversations with his ex, I was the only woman Nelson talked to. He was just lonely. And though he was in, shall we say, a low spot in his life, he really was a great photographer. Even his pet portraits had something really happening in them. He was a disaster, but in a good-natured way, and somewhere under that bad hairdo was a real artist.

  And he'd come to think of me as his discovery. He came with me that night to deliver the photographs in part, I think, so he could take some credit. He was completely sober that afternoon, and I found myself wishing he were that way all the time. He helped me carry the photos in, and we hung them easily on big nails in the exposed brick walls. Then we stood back to admire our work.

  “Did you drink when you were married?” I asked, just to make chitchat.

  “Sure,” Nelson said.

  “But not like now.”

  “No,” he said. “Now I'm on a bender.”

  “I like you better sober,” I said.

  “I wish I did,” he said.

  Just as we were leaving, Anna Belkin herself—tall and swanky with straight-across bangs and cat glasses—came in. She lavished praise on me until Nelson had a coughing fit, and then wanted to know what prices I had put on the photos.

  I shrugged. I wasn't sure. Then I squinted: “Fifty bucks?”

  “Oh, Lord, no,” she said. “You can't charge fifty. Nobody charges fifty.”

  I felt embarrassed, suddenly, and greedy. “Twenty-five?” I suggested.

  At that number, she laughed so hard, she snorted. “Wrong way!” she said. She was going to start them at $350. But if they moved too fast, she was bumping them up to $400.

  I looked at Nelson. Nelson looked at me.

  Finally, I said, “You're the boss.”

  On the way back to the art van, I was glad to be heading home. Nelson had a pregnant quality to his pauses that evening, as if he were wanting to ask me something or tell me something, and, though I chose not to imagine what it might be, I knew for sure that I did not want to hear it.

  It was clear and cold, though not snowing. Nelson was elated at my success with the photos and was far more articulate than I was used to. “You've really got a way of seeing things,” he said, “an instinct for when to snap.” I was lapping up the praise like a puppy, and it was hard to know if I suddenly liked him more because he was sober or because of all the praise. He grinned at me from the driver's seat. “From total beginner to café artiste in one semester,” he said. “I must really be one hell of a teacher.”

  “It's all you, Nelson,” I said.

  He had shaved that morning, and I found myself thinking he'd be a pretty decent man if he could be at his best all the time. But, of course, no one can do that. Nelson made it seem like he was drinking because his wife left him. But it was most likely the other way around. I studied him until he glanced over and saw me doing it, then I turned my eyes to the road.

  “Can I tell you something?” he asked then.

  “Sure.”

  “I quit drinking yesterday.”

  “Oh,” I said. “I noticed you seemed different.”

  “Showered and shaved, for one.”

  “But also, you know, sober,” I added.

  We both nodded as the streets moved past the windows.

  Finally, I said, “How's it going?”

  “It's okay, so far,” he said. “Tonight'll be the real test.”

  “Why tonight?”

  He seemed thoughtful. “Usually,” he said, “the first night, I'm full of gumption. I am inspired. I am committed to change and self-improvement.” He waited to enter a roundabout. “By the second night, all that's worn off.”

  “Are you going to get the shakes or anything?” I asked.

  “A little,” he said, shrugging.

  “You already have them,” I guessed.

  He nodded. “And the headache. And the nausea. And the vomiting.”

  “You should get somebody to stay with you tonight,” I said.

  “Well,” he said, “actually, I was wondering if you might do it.”

  This was it. This was the question he had been not asking me all night.

  “Nelson, I can't,” I said. He knew Peter was leaving for three weeks the next morning. It was an insane question. He never should have asked it.

  “I'm sorry,” he said, as he pulled the van up in front of my building and put it in park. “I just wasn't sure who else to ask.”

  “You should go to AA,” I said, but he wasn't listening.

  “There's one more thing,” he said, looking at the steering wheel.

  “Okay,” I said. “But I need to get going.”

  “I'm in love with you.”

  Chapter 24

  I can't say that hearing those words didn't get to me. Even though Nelson had clearly fixated on me as some kind of exit strategy from the life he'd dug for himself. Even though he had that crazy hair and was so irritable and was not my type at all. Even though I should have seen it coming. It affected me to hear it. Words like that are powerful. They make you feel wide awake. They make you stop with your fingers on the door handle.

  “Nelson,” I said, a nervous tightness in my chest. “That's just not practical.”

  “I know,” he said. “And I know you don't feel the same way.”

  “Not even remotely,” I said.

  “I know,” he said again. “But that doesn't change my situation.”

  “I'm sorry about that, Nelson,” I said.

  I was just about to open my door and escape when Nelson pulled a folded piece of paper out of his jacket.

  “What is this?” I asked, taking it.

  “It's a recommendation letter,” he said.

  I unfolded the paper. It really was a recommendation letter. For Nelson. From his ex-wife.

  I looked at him for an explanation.

  “She called me to meet her for coffee the other day—” he started.

  “Good,” I said. That sounded promising.

  “To tell me that she was getting married.”

  “Oh.”

  “She thought I was crazy when I asked for the letter, but then she gave in when I told her about you.”

  “What did you tell her about me?”

  “That I thought you could save me.”

  It should have been creepy. Grown people don't think like that about other people. But somehow it wasn't. Something about his face as he said it reminded me of Alexander's. His expression carried a hopefulness that made me feel tender toward him.r />
  “I can't save you, Nelson,” I said. And then, as gently as I could, “And I'm not going to try.”

  It was time to get out. I wanted to get to Peter and turn this moment as quickly as possible into something that had already happened instead of something that was still happening. I opened the door then and turned to say good-night, but Nelson was out of the van already, waiting for me on the sidewalk. I walked around to him and said, “Please tell me you will find someone to be with you tonight,” I said.

  “I'll do my best,” he said.

  And then it was awkward. A hug, after his proclamation, seemed too intimate. A handshake seemed cold. I decided on a little “bye-bye” wave, but Nelson wanted to shake, and when I gave him my hand, he pulled me toward him and—with astonishing agility from a man I'd seen lolling around the photography studio for months—moved in to me, put his other arm around my waist, and kissed me.

  There are no words to describe how shocked I was. Nelson was not exactly a man of action. By the time it occurred to me to push away, I had already been released. All I remember at that moment, as I stumbled back across the snow-packed sidewalk, was Nelson's face, looking pleased with himself and like he'd accomplished a very impressive thing. And then, right after that, I remember Peter, appearing out of nowhere and shoving Nelson in the chest, almost knocking him over.

  “What the hell was that?” Peter wanted to know.

  “Peter,” I said, “it's nothing.”

  But Peter wasn't looking at me. I'm not even sure he heard me.

  “What the hell was that?” he asked Nelson again. “What the hell was that?”

  Nelson was blinking at Peter with his mouth a little open. Peter was waiting for an answer. I couldn't figure out what to do or say. Even at this point, I was still hoping to resolve this whole thing quickly and get on with our real lives, skimming my mind for an answer that would put things back where they should have been. I had candles and champagne upstairs!

  And then, in a moment of exceptional stupidity, Nelson piped up with an explanation that I guess he thought would clear the whole thing up. “I'm in love with her, man.”

  If we ‘d been in a movie, Peter might have given an exasperated look to the camera. “I'm in love with her” was bad enough. But, really, adding “man” to the end was just asking for it.