Just Once

by Lori Handeland

  She sat in the front row of his class for six weeks and drove him mad. Whenever she was near he smelled lemons. Charley had always liked lemons, usually in his vodka and lemonade.

  He later learned the streaks in her hair were from lying in the sun after combing lemon juice through the strands. Something all the girls were doing. Strangely she was the only one who smelled like lemons even after she’d washed the juice away.

  They would go out with the other students – take pictures, have a beer afterward, talk about photography, the war, the election, the death penalty, the meaning of ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ – anything, everything – then go their separate ways.

  Charley dreamed of her every night.

  It wasn’t appropriate. He was her teacher. But he wasn’t a teacher. This was a short-term gig. He started counting the days until the summer semester was over.

  After that final class, the students filed out, shaking Charley’s hand, thanking him, wishing him well. Frankie sat in her chair until everyone was gone.

  Charley had been waiting for a time when there would be only them; now that it was here he wasn’t sure what to say. They were two years apart in age, but he felt so much older. Probably too old.

  He still woke sometimes, screaming in the night. A lot of the guys who’d come back from Vietnam did. Charley had witnessed plenty of horrors. Recording them seemed to have imprinted the images on his brain as well as on film. The thought of Francesca seeing him screaming, crying, thrashing … he wasn’t sure he could stand it.

  ‘I hope you enjoyed the class.’

  Her lips curved. She didn’t speak.

  Charley opened and closed his hands, a nervous gesture he usually soothed by picking up a camera, so he did. He trained the lens on her.

  She placed her palm over the glass. ‘Maybe later.’

  ‘Later?’ he repeated stupidly.

  She took his hand and led him home.

  Later – after – he took pictures of her and she took pictures of him. They were the first set of many.

  For Frankie and Charley photography was how they spoke to the world; it reflected both thoughts and feeling. Pictures were a language they shared, one very few other people spoke. In finding each other, they’d found someone who heard them in a way no one else ever had. From that first day, Charley had a hard time remembering how long he and Frankie had been together because his life without her was dim, a time spent in shadows best forgotten. All he wanted was to live in the world he’d discovered with her. Who wouldn’t if given the chance?

  Frankie was from Milwaukee, the only child of a second-generation German housewife and a first-generation Italian autoworker at the American Motors plant. Frankie’s desire to go to college, to become a photographer, mystified them.

  ‘My mother wants nothing more than to clean, cook and make sure my dad’s after-work coffee has just the right amount of brandy.’

  ‘So they mystify you too.’

  Frankie tilted her head so she could see into his face. ‘I never thought of it like that, but yeah.’

  They lay together, naked, on the pull-out couch in her studio apartment. WKTI, the local Top Forty station, played ‘Sara Smile’ in the background. The morning sun pushed through a gap in the curtains and flowed across Frankie’s hip like golden water.

  Her sheets were old, faded but soft, and they smelled like lemons too. There were books and lenses and photographs and magazines spread across every surface. Her furniture appeared to have been confiscated from basements across America – scarred end tables, an ancient television with tin foiled rabbit ears, kitchen table with teeth marks on the legs. Charley hoped they were from a dog and not a kid, but who could tell?

  ‘It’s a mysterious time for everyone in this country. Things are changing. They’re going to keep changing.’

  Just this summer there had been riots in South Africa; an airliner hijacked from Athens and taken to Entebbe, where the Israelis staged a raid to free the hostages; a former peanut farmer had become the Democratic presidential nominee; soldiers had died in the Korean Demilitarized Zone, in Ireland and Palestine.

  ‘You don’t think life, people, everything will settle down now that the war’s over?’ Her breath puffed against his chest and made him shiver.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘I don’t.’

  He planned to take photographs of upheaval all over the world for as long as he could. Except …

  He peered at the woman in his arms. She had freckles on her nose. He thought he might like to stare at those freckles for the rest of his life.

  Charley woke the next morning still in her bed. He didn’t want to go, and that was new. Usually he left before dawn broke. Today he lingered, even though he had someplace to be.

  They took a shower, drank coffee, made pancakes for breakfast, read the paper in their underwear and T-shirts. Frankie’s showed the movie poster for Jaws, which had been released that summer. She’d seen it twice. Charley wore the concert T-shirt for David Bowie’s Diamond Dogs Tour. He’d been in Vietnam at the time, won the thing in a card game.

  Frankie didn’t seem in any more hurry to see the end of him than he was to see the end of her. Eventually, he had to either go or take her with him.

  ‘You wanna meet my parents?’

  She shrugged. ‘You wanna meet mine?’

  Charley drove an old white VW bus. He loved that vehicle despite the rust. It was the first one he’d ever owned. However, when he pulled it to a stop at the foot of the long gravel lane that led to his family farm, his father, George, came on to the porch and spat.

  ‘Tell me you didn’t drive that hippy bus through town.’

  ‘OK.’

  He had, but why mention it? He wasn’t staying.

  Charley’s mother and his two younger brothers – Ben was fifteen, David was seventeen – joined his father. All three men wore denim overalls, long-sleeved dark shirts and work boots, despite the heat. The males shared Charley’s dark curling hair; he shared his mother’s blue eyes.

  Charley had never noticed before how faded everything was – the house, the barn, the cows, his family. The only real color, as far as he could see, was Fancy – green eyes, hair in every shade of brown, her swirling orange skirt, beaded moccasins and white peasant blouse. She stood out like a jeweled brooch dropped into a sea of old hay.

  ‘This is Francesca Sicari.’

  His father grunted. ‘As foreign as your car.’

  ‘I was born in Milwaukee,’ Frankie said.

  Charley’s father just grunted again.

  The visit didn’t improve. Charley’s mother tried, but she was as mystified by Frankie as Frankie’s own parents were.

  ‘You go to college?’ Claire smoothed her chapped hands over her blue cotton dress. ‘Why?’

  Charley had never before noticed how prison matron his mother’s clothes looked.

  ‘I … uh …’ Frankie glanced at Charley. ‘Wanted to learn.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Photography.’

  Charley’s dad cast him a quick, disgusted glance. ‘Your student?’

  ‘Not any more.’

  They left right after dinner.

  To her credit, Frankie only smiled when Charley’s dad asked if she was a hippy.

  ‘I’m a hippy, Dad,’ Charley said.

  ‘I suppose that means you aren’t coming home to help.’

  ‘I wasn’t ever coming home to help.’

  From the instant he’d peered through a viewfinder at the rice paddies below his helicopter, where people toiled year in and year out for very little, often caught in the crossfire of a war they hadn’t wanted and didn’t understand, Charley hadn’t planned to do anything but frame what he saw within that square over and over again. No matter what he had to do; no matter what he had to not do.

  ‘How’m I gonna keep the farm goin’ without you?’ his father demanded.

  ‘You have Ben and Dave.’

  ‘We could really make something of this place wi
th one more pair of hands.’

  ‘That’s your world, not mine.’

  Charley’s mother gasped. His father’s face turned red. Charley tensed for an argument and—

  Frankie took his hand. ‘Thank you for dinner. It was lovely meeting you.’

  Then she led him back to the car.

  He didn’t meet her parents until the following spring. It didn’t go much better than the meeting with his own.

  Frankie still had one more year of college. Charley spent most of it on assignments for the Associated Press all over the world. He’d planned to rent a cheap apartment in a city with an international airport. Instead, he used the money he saved from not having to rent a place to fly into the small Marion, Illinois airport, or sometimes into St Louis, where he’d rent a car and drive to Carbondale. He left the VW bus with Frankie. She loved it almost as much as he did.

  When Frankie graduated in May he was at the Kentucky Derby.

  Charley was discouraged at the lack of hard news stories he was sent to cover. As the new guy, he shot a lot of fluff – like the Kentucky Derby. What he wanted to do was go to Cambodia and record what the country was like since Pol Pot had become prime minister – Cambodian code for dictator – last year. But he had to pay his dues.

  After the Kentucky Derby, Charley flew to Wisconsin. Frankie’s parents hosted a graduation party at their two-story brick duplex in South Milwaukee, though they seemed more inclined to show off their daughter’s boyfriend than their daughter’s diploma. Charley spent the day talking up the Southern Illinois program and insisting that a degree in photography was really a degree.

  ‘She’ll take wedding photos?’ one of Frankie’s aunts asked.

  ‘Maybe school portraits?’ suggested another.

  Charley gave up trying to explain photojournalism. ‘Whatever she wants.’

  ‘You don’t mind her working?’ asked an uncle – Paolo, he thought.

  ‘I don’t have anything to say about it.’

  Across the room, Frankie caught his eye and winked.

  Charley was dazzled even at a distance. They hadn’t had time alone together in a month. They wouldn’t have any here either since they were staying at her parents’ place, in separate rooms.

  ‘You don’t plan to marry my Francesca?’

  Frankie’s father – Pietro at birth, Peter in America – had joined him. He was short and wiry, with leathery skin and dark, sharp eyes. Charley towered over him by nearly a foot. The guy still scared him. He was so fierce when it came to his only child.

  ‘I … uh … well …’ He hadn’t thought of marriage. He’d been too busy thinking of …

  Charley flushed, which probably made him appear guilty. Though of what, he couldn’t say.

  ‘She talks of nothing but you. She dates no other man. If you do not plan to make her your wife, you need to run along.’

  ‘I travel three hundred days a year.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘She’d be alone all the time.’

  ‘She’d be alone with your name, your protection—’

  ‘Papa!’ Frankie must have seen Charley’s panic, because she had come to his rescue. ‘I don’t need his name; I have my own. And I can protect myself.’

  Mr Sicari fixed Charley with a glare. ‘Are you a communist?’

  ‘Papa!’ Frankie said again, but this time she was laughing. ‘It isn’t 1955.’

  ‘I’m not a communist, sir.’

  Mr Sicari didn’t seem mollified by that, but he did stop asking Charley questions he couldn’t answer. At least for the rest of the day.

  Later, Frankie apologized. ‘He’s old fashioned. He thinks women should be married.’

  ‘What do you think?’

  They had gone for a walk along Lake Michigan, where the late May breeze still carried a hint of ice, but the water was so blue it hurt to stare at the surface beneath the sun.

  ‘I think I’m starting a new job next week, and that’s enough change for me right now.’

  Frankie had taken a position as a news photographer for the Milwaukee Journal. Charley had written her a recommendation. Probably not exactly on the up and up, considering, except she had been his best student. He hadn’t lied about that.

  Following the graduation, Charley was sent to San Francisco where 200,000 people marched in protest of Anita Bryant’s anti-gay stance, as well as the murder of Robert Hillsborough, a homosexual gardener who had been stabbed fifteen times on his way home from a club. Charley received his first Pulitzer nomination for his photos of the march.

  He didn’t get back to Milwaukee until autumn. The leaves were all orange and red and yellow. Charley barely noticed. He missed Frankie so much by then his stomach ached whenever he thought of her.

  She met him at the airport and took him to his hotel, where they barely made it into the room before they started tearing off each other’s clothes.

  A half-hour later, Frankie kissed his chest and started to pick up her things.

  ‘Where are you going?’ Charley had been gearing up for round two.

  ‘I live with my parents. They’re expecting me – us really – for dinner.’

  ‘Let’s get a place of our own.’

  She laughed. When he didn’t, she stopped. ‘You were serious?’

  ‘I almost always am.’ Charley didn’t waste time with jokes or teasing. Life was serious, and in the places he worked more serious than most.

  ‘We can’t live together.’

  ‘We have before.’

  ‘No, you visited me at college.’

  ‘Where you kept all my stuff and my van.’

  ‘I still have your van.’ She cocked her head and her hair flowed over one shoulder, the colors beneath the glow of the bedside lamp reminding him of the trees outside. ‘I guess in some countries that’s as good as married.’

  ‘What countries?’ he asked.

  ‘Joke.’ She waved her hand. ‘Never mind. I can’t live with you.’

  ‘I suppose your dad would come after me with his shotgun.’

  ‘He doesn’t own a gun.’

  ‘For this, he’d probably buy one.’ Charley sat up in the hotel bed and held out his hand. She didn’t take it, and he got a little scared. ‘You don’t want to move in with me?’

  Her face softened. ‘There’s nothing I’d like more, but I have to live in this town and you don’t.’

  ‘I just said I’d be living with you.’

  ‘Your idea of living with me is dropping in between assignments.’ She made a ‘halt’ gesture. ‘I understand your job. I don’t want you to change. But I can’t move in with you. I won’t do that to my parents.’

  ‘It isn’t their life; it’s ours.’

  ‘This isn’t my town; it’s theirs. And it wouldn’t be fair.’

  At least she hadn’t said it wouldn’t be right. Because Charley couldn’t think of anything more right than them sharing every moment they could, from now until forever. Didn’t she feel the same way?

  ‘Let’s get married.’

  Where had that come from? He had no idea, but as soon as he said it, he wanted to get married more than he’d ever wanted anything except, maybe, his camera.

  Idiot! He definitely wanted Frankie more than a camera.

  ‘What?’ She dropped all the clothes she’d picked up back on to the floor. ‘No!’

  ‘You’re telling me no?’ He was not only surprised, but that niggle of fear that had started up now deepened. What would he do if she didn’t feel the same way?

  ‘Charley.’ Leaving the garments where they’d fallen, she sat on the bed. ‘You’ve never even said that you loved me.’

  He hadn’t? He tried to remember an occasion when he had so that he could bring it out and prove her wrong, but his mind was blank. Had he only thought the words every time he’d seen her, touched her, woken up next to her? That couldn’t be true.

  He was a fool.

  Charley framed her face in his palms and kissed her brow. ‘I love
you.’ He kissed her right cheek, then her left. ‘I love you.’

  His mouth trailed over her eyelids. ‘I love you.’

  Then at last he took her lips; her hands cupped his where they still rested on her face. He lifted his head, looked into her eyes and, together, they smiled.

  ‘Let’s find an apartment,’ she said.

  Hannah

  Washington DC, 1990

  Hannah Cartwright walked along Seventeenth Street. It was her first day as an intern for National Geographic.

  She didn’t think she’d slept more than an hour, total, all of last night. She hoped she didn’t fall asleep on her feet today, though the way she felt now, she didn’t think she’d sleep again soon. She was so damn nervous.

  From the moment her professor at NYU had suggested she apply for an internship at National Geographic, Hannah had been desperate to be accepted. She’d loved her journalism classes in high school; the one place she’d fit in was at her school newspaper/magazine. All she’d ever wanted was to work for National Geographic. Which only made her one of a hundred thousand other kids with a dream.

  She’d applied for an internship in editorial – her hope to become editor-in-chief someday – but what she’d gotten was an internship in the photography department. Hannah knew nothing about photography beyond point and shoot.

  Nevertheless, she’d taken the job. As her twin brother, Heath, had said: ‘If you’re going to be in charge of the entire shebang you’re going to need to know everything. Why not start with what you know the least about?’

  He had a point, but she was still scared out of her wits. What if she was fired the first day?

  Hannah paused and hugged herself. Several pedestrians side-stepped, one casting her a disgusted glance, another a slightly concerned one. Was she crazy?

  She felt a little crazy. Or maybe terrified was the right word.

  ‘I bet Gloria Steinem wasn’t terrified her first day on the job.’

  Hannah didn’t realize she’d said that out loud until more concerned, disgusted glances came her way. She straightened her spine and marched on.