Combat Camera

by Andrew Somerset

“I need a decision.”

  “Rich might be the boss, but she’s the boss of Rich. She runs the show, man. Believe it.”

  So much for your story. You’re not about to broach this one with Jade. At least Barker thinks you’re a genius. Jade thinks you’re a dunce. The only saving grace was that she once called you harmless, but that appraisal could change. You’re not doing some exposé, are you?

  He found Jade in the office, a small room upstairs that contained two desks, one computer, a small refrigerator, a locker, and an enormous safe that occupied one corner of the room in squat solemnity.

  Below this safe, in the kitchen, an anonymous cook toils, never suspecting that at any moment the ceiling will collapse under its weight. One day, the floor will collapse and this safe will fall to his doom. Like the witch in the Wizard of Oz, the cook is reduced to a pair of legs protruding from the wreckage, never again to siphon off his percentage of the dancers’ tips. Stripes on his socks. Joyful munchkins dance and sing. The bouncer beats the shit out of them on principle: nobody dances here for free. Melissa clicks her heels: there’s no place like home. Zane, her all-purpose companion, frets and wrings his hands. If I only had a story, if I only had a clue, if I only had a straw to cling to. Or some kind of faith, at least. Maybe the wizard can help.

  Jade sat at the desk, fingernails clacking on the computer keyboard, overdressed as usual in soap-opera chic. Her hair moved in precise lock step with the turn of her head as she greeted Zane. She was the only thing in Gentlemen’s VIP that matched its exterior pretensions.

  “Did Rich leave my cheque?”

  “You and your social graces.”

  She slipped a finger into the waist pocket of her jacket and retrieved a key, sat down at the other desk and fit the key to the desk drawer. From the drawer she retrieved a white envelope. When Zane reached for it, she snatched it back with a flick of her wrist, and smiled.

  “You’re not one for small talk, are you?”

  She tapped the corner of the envelope against the desk, wearing a small smile. He felt like a wounded mouse. She kept this up for some time, fixing Zane with an unwavering gaze.

  “I think we might get some rain.”

  Jade stopped tapping the envelope and laid it on the desk in front of her, carefully aligning it so that it was square with the edge, face up so that Zane could read his name in plain, hasty capitals, inverted. Satisfied that the envelope was just so, she raised her eyes.

  “How are you and Melissa getting along?”

  “Didn’t we already do this?”

  “I like to keep up-to-date.”

  “You want a play-by-play?”

  Jade laughed and then realigned the envelope, as if it had slipped out of plumb during her moment of informality. She got up and opened the refrigerator, pulled out a can of diet ginger ale, popped a straw into it with a precise jab of her thumb and forefinger. Her lipstick left a smear on the straw.

  “What I hear is you’re taking pictures of her.”

  “And?”

  “Pictures are for men who are afraid of women.”

  “I think you should stop making assumptions.”

  “I’m not here to judge. As Rich would say, whatever flips your cookie.” Jade put the ginger ale can down carefully in the centre of the desk and picked up the envelope. She tapped it against her palm and looked steadily at Zane. “You’re not on a leash here. But I want you to remember our previous conversation.”

  “I’ll bear it firmly in mind.”

  “I trust you’ll also bear in mind that publishing photos of Melissa anywhere without our permission will make Rich very angry.”

  “They’re purely for our own enjoyment.”

  So much for that. The situation now mandates alternative methods. More precisely, you’re just going to have to be sneaky.

  Downstairs, Bill worked a mop on the floor by the bar. A smeared trail of spilt beer led to a pile of broken glass that glittered in the corner. The spill that Bill was working on looked dark, like blood, but it might have been the lighting. Zane felt the bullet whiff his hair again.

  “Looks like you had a mishap,” he said.

  “Some asshole got out of line.”

  Zane stepped around the mess and made for the door.

  Melissa lived in a basement apartment with pipes running across the ceiling and small windows that opened onto the parking lot of a medical walk-in clinic. The view from the windows, slightly above eye level, was of car tires and the worried feet and ankles of people who found themselves suffering from something they feared was more serious than the flu. After dark, it was necessary to draw the curtains to avoid being put on display, because as Melissa explained, being put on display on your own terms was one thing, but you had to draw the line somewhere. It was a matter of control.

  Melissa shared this happy space with another woman, named Marilou, who also danced for Barker. On discovering this fact, Zane felt he had uncovered the truth of several others.

  “I thought your roommate’s name was Clarissa.”

  “I said she went by Clarissa, not that her name was Clarissa. You can’t dance with a name like Marilou unless you’re going for men with a thing for farm girls from Kansas. Or you want to do some kind of Gilligan’s Island act. And in that case you need a Ginger.”

  “I think Gilligan’s Island was Mary-Anne.”

  Melissa waved a hand in the air.

  “Don’t tell me about your fetishes. The point is, Marilou wants to appeal to a wider audience.”

  We are successful because we bring diverse product offerings to the marketplace. Everyone you meet, it seems, has a business strategy.

  Marilou herself was splayed on the couch, reading. She looked not in the least like a farm girl from Kansas, although Zane had to admit that he was relying solely on stereotype, and his actual experience of Kansan farm girls was nil. In place of denim overalls or cut-off jeans, Marilou wore pyjama pants and a tank top that, in keeping with the current fashion, was many sizes too small. She had long, blonde hair that she wore in a simple, straight style, but dark roots and her dark eyebrows, one of which was pierced, betrayed her. A pierced and tattooed navel peeked out from under the tank top.

  She paused a moment, as if to finish a sentence, and then looked up and turned the book face-down in her lap. Zane checked the cover out of curiosity; it was an old paperback copy of The Edible Woman.

  “So you’re the photographer.”

  “I am. And you’re the roommate.”

  Marilou made no movement beyond the musculature of her jaw, working on a stick of chewing gum.

  “How’s the book?”

  “It’s pretty good.”

  “Don’t get into that,” said Melissa. She walked away.

  “I never liked Margaret Atwood,” said Zane.

  Marilou fixed him with a look of withering contempt. Apparently his stock was falling. To probable pervert, we now add certified dolt.

  “You wouldn’t. You’re a man.”

  “I take it you’re some kind of feminist?”

  “Like it’s a dirty word.”

  “I get paid to be curious,” he said.

  She rolled her eyes, turned the book back over and went back to reading. She muttered something under her breath. Zane thought he heard exploitive male.

  “How do you square that with your job?”

  With exaggerated movements, Marilou again inverted the book in her lap and glared at Zane.

  “How do you mean?”

  “I mean being a feminist and being a stripper. Isn’t that kind of oil and water?”

  “What’s wrong with being a stripper?”

  “Nothing. I just – ”

  “So it’s feminists you have a problem with?”

  She pushed her jaw forward as she spoke and arched her eyebrows in a dare.

  “Apparently it’s just one feminist in particular.”

  “Well, I reject your fuckin’ value judgments. It’s my body. What I do with it is up
to me.”

  “I warned you,” shouted Melissa, from the next room.

  “I’m in control. Stripping is an expression of my empowerment.”

  “I’m not sure I buy that one.”

  “I don’t care if you buy it or not. Your masculine value judgments are just another way of denying our empowerment. Just another way to control us.”

  “I see.”

  “Yeah. I highly doubt that.”

  Marilou had refused to sign on for his story. Melissa had quoted Marilou as saying, anyone wants to take my picture better pay me. Zane now suspected that this was paraphrased from a longer speech containing the words exploitation and male.

  “Well,” he said. “It was nice meeting you.” He summoned his most obnoxious smile; she rolled her eyes and turned back to her book. You can’t win them all. Or, in fact, any.

  Zane joined Melissa in the kitchen, a white-tiled room smaller than his bathroom, cramped by the stove, refrigerator and countertop. He had brought his old Leica rangefinder, dug out from the boxes in the corner, and two lenses, a twenty-eight and a twenty-one. Given the tight quarters, he’d only need the twenty-one. He threaded the ultrawide onto the lens mount.

  “Shit, Zane, that thing looks about four hundred years old.”

  “More like twenty.” He loaded a roll of film, snapped the base plate back into place and closed the film door. Not even film loading could be convenient on the Leica. “And I’m shooting this in black and white, too.”

  “Why not try cave painting?”

  “There’s technical reasons, to do with lighting.”

  “Your cave’s too dark to paint in?”

  “There’s a thing called colour temperature. It’s complicated.”

  For which we have white balance. But there was the smell of film and the feel of working with it, the alchemy of development, the control and the sense of serendipity when control lapsed. And something else, too, something that Zane couldn’t quite pin down. It had that dramatic look.

  “So what do I do?”

  “Nothing. Do what you normally do.”

  “Like what?”

  “Pretend I’m not even here.”

  “So . . . .”

  “Just do stuff.”

  Zane favoured the direct approach: get the camera into the subject’s face early and often, until eventually the wide-angle lens becomes an accepted feature of your victim’s personal space, as mundane as a wristwatch or a light bulb. The first three rolls are a warm-up. Soon, having one’s portrait shot from a distance of two feet becomes as normal as breathing, the lens just another feature of the room.

  “Just do stuff,” she said.

  So Zane shot her looking doubtfully into the lens from eighteen inches away. The distance and the lens would make her look like the bubble head in his apartment’s peephole, but she didn’t need to know that. You keep on pushing until she writes you off as part of the background, like the sound of water gurgling down the pipes overhead.

  She stuck her tongue out at him. Do what you normally do: she started picking dishes from the sink and piling them on the counter. When the sink was empty she squirted detergent in it with the water running, and started scrubbing at the sink. Then she plugged the drain and slid the dirty dishes into the growing mound of suds.

  Zane shot eight nondescript frames of Melissa with her hands in the sink. The overhead light played in the suds that stuck to her arms. A strand of hair fell from behind her ear and tickled her face, and in brushing it aside she left a smear of suds on her cheek; he made sure to get that shot.

  “It’s okay,” she said. “I’ll dry.”

  “Just act like I’m not here.”

  “How convenient for you.”

  She tested her work by rubbing a finger against a plate until it squeaked, and then put the plate in the rack.

  “Why d’you want pictures of me washing the dishes, anyway?”

  “It is my duty to record this domestic scene for posterity. One day, historians may be curious as to how a porn star obtained clean dishes. Mine may be the only visual record.”

  “Porn star.”

  Melissa shook her head and continued scrubbing. Perhaps not the wisest choice of words.

  “Shit, Zane, you were a famous photographer, right? You could be taking pictures of Nicole Kidman washing her dishes.”

  “Nobody will ever care how those people obtain clean dishes.”

  “Yeah, right.”

  The possible outcomes of letting Melissa believe that he found her more interesting than Nicole Kidman were not to be considered. He went back to the viewfinder and carefully photographed her washing a plate and then placing it in the rack.

  “You a big fan of Nicole Kidman?”

  “Just a movie fan.”

  She pulled the plug and let the water drain from the sink, then took a dishtowel from the stove and wiped the suds off her arms.

  “When I was a kid I loved to go to the movies and imagine I was one of the people in the story.”

  Everybody does that, but we all like to think we’re unique.

  “You could do that,” he said.

  “What?”

  “Movies. I mean, you can act.”

  “Shit, Zane, you know how many actors there are in this city? There’s twenty actors for every fuckin’ part.”

  “Have you done a lot of auditions?”

  “I haven’t done any fuckin’ ‘auditions.’ The best I’d ever do is a bit part in some shitty dinner theatre production of South Pacific. Fuck that. I make good money from Rich.”

  “That doesn’t bother you?”

  “What?”

  “Giving up.”

  “Just take your stupid pictures.”

  Melissa turned to the dish rack and started drying the dishes. Zane let her get back to it, then resumed taking pictures until he finished the roll.

  “It doesn’t bother you, settling for less.”

  She stopped and looked at him for a moment.

  “Why d’you have to ask all these questions?”

  “You’re the story.”

  “And you think I’m settling for less.”

  “What do you think?”

  “I think you’re full of shit.”

  She turned back to the sink, moved on to the pots and pans. Zane shot a few more frames, but the irritation on her face wasn’t the look he was after.

  “There’s no ‘settling for less.’ There’s what you can do, and what you can’t do.”

  “And this is what you can do.”

  “It’s not complicated. I get up in the morning and I go to work. I come home and I watch TV and go to sleep. I do the dishes, I grocery shop.”

  Zane said nothing.

  “It’s just a fuckin’ job, man.”

  “Same like anyone,” he said.

  “Same like anyone. All that other shit is just dreams. Kid stuff.”

  “But not for Nicole Kidman.”

  “Shit, get real. That’s like a whole other fuckin’ planet.”

  She folded the dishtowel, staring up at the wall. Zane suspected that she didn’t see the cracked blue paint or the grease splatters.

  “But she got there.”

  “She got a lucky break.”

  “We make our breaks.” You have small parts and small actors.

  “You just don’t get it, do you?”

  He waited.

  “You dream this big dream and then take that part in South Pacific, that’s settling for less. I’m not settling for shit. I’m just doing a job. I’m just normal, man.”

  Zane experimented with framing. She finished the pots and put them away.

  “Sorry to disappoint you,” she said.

  “I’m not disappointed.”

  She hung the dishtowel from the oven door handle.

  “Anyway, Zane: when I’m famous like Nicole Kidman, I’ll let you come visit me in my mansion in Beverly Hills. Your job will be to remind me of my humble roots.”

  “
Deal.”

  Everyone knows California is full of the undead. One more vampire will hardly be noticed.

  Zane burned film. He photographed Melissa eating her breakfast, cooking her supper, watching television. He shot her at the bus stop and on the subway and in the supermarket. He shot her with carrots, with breakfast cereal, with milk and with chicken. He made sure to cover all four food groups: a balanced diet.

  Bill came off hiatus, got back in the swing of things, renewed his commitment to his art. He had rediscovered his muse. His work now possessed an urgent subtlety, its violence more frightening in understatement. The critics praised his mastery of subtext. At least, that was Barker’s view of the matter. He sold pixels like cocaine crystals, thousands of grains to feed that jones. Business was good.

  Zane shot Melissa’s sardonic smile, shot her laugh, shot her stare lost in the middle distance. On a bus, he shot her with earbuds in her ears, ignoring him. She was angry.

  Over time, the lens wears you down.

  Do you want another drink, the waitress wants to know. In splashes of coloured light spilling down from the stage she looks to be in her mid-twenties, fair, with blonde hair falling around her bare shoulders. A heavy eastern European accent renders her all but incomprehensible through the pounding music. The sum of her clothing is a black miniskirt, over which she wears a black waitress apron. Pretty, perhaps, under different circumstances, pretty in that fragile Russian way. She slouched hips-forward in front of Zane, evidently thinking this a provocative pose. To Zane, she just looked bored.

  “I’m fine.” His drink was two-thirds empty.

  “You want me to sit with you?”

  “No, thanks.”

  “A table dance?”

  “You’re wasting your time.”

  A scowl. Whatever circumstances she might have been pretty under, these were definitely not. The hip jutted farther.

  “You can’t sit all night with one drink. This is the rule.”

  Not necessarily Russian. She could have come from anywhere east of the Polish border, any land of Slavic cheekbones.

  “Rum and coke, then.”

  She looked at him, an insect, and then walked down two tables and struck up conversation with two men sitting there, lit up with smiles. Both of them about thirty, wearing goatees. Hard hands give them away, hands that build things. Roofs, walls, floors, concrete, brick. Something you said about a documentary being something constructed. You say stupid things when you get too smart. It wraps around on you. Zane’s hands were soft and smooth.