Eight Girls Taking Pictures

by Whitney Otto

  Jessie could have added that women were too busy keeping house, tending to the garden, and the children, and trying so hard not be branded “selfish” to fight for their need for aloneness to create. Selfishness is the crime of anyone who isn’t supposed to think of herself first: women, mothers, wives, childless women, women, career women, women, women with only one child. Women. Women with messy living rooms. Women who didn’t get to the market or the dry cleaner. Women who wanted to work. All selfish. But Jessie wasn’t at a point where she said everything on her mind in mixed company.

  She did say to Cymbeline, “I guess it’s to show that a woman photographer can be indistinguishable from a male photographer. Or, well, maybe it’s the opposite.” She really hadn’t worked out if she was after difference or similarity because she hadn’t worked out which would cause men to value her as an artist.

  The women in her collective would say that she cared too much about a man’s approval.

  Sam placed sandwiches on the table, along with a cold asparagus salad. Jessie knew he had been listening as he worked, and she admired his silence; no man she knew would’ve allowed this conversation to continue without offering his two cents’ worth. No man she knew would be making lunch either, not without some applause for his efforts. Sam not weighing in was the most intriguing comment of all. Maybe it was his youth. He looked to be twenty.

  “I gotta jam. I’ll be back this evening,” he said to Cymbeline.

  They ate in silence after Sam left.

  “I’m so sorry,” said Jessie. “Emile isn’t usually like this.”

  “What’s he usually like, then?” Cymbeline looked at Jessie, who felt judged with those magnified eyes upon her.

  “On time. Mostly.”

  “Yes. But what’s he really like?”

  It felt as if she would open a floodgate if she were to honestly answer Cymbeline’s question, What’s he really like? He’s like a habit you don’t remember developing. He’s like a fever, and the best day you ever had.

  “He’s a good photographer,” said Jessie.

  “As good as you?”

  “Well, I suppose that’s subjective.” Her answer was reflexive; anything else was too risky. Not that Jessie was often asked, but to say “Yes” or even “No, I’m better,” would be to knock the earth off its axis—no woman could stay with a man less accomplished than she, and if she did stay it would be almost impossible to freely admit it. It was pressure from within and without. The women Jessie knew might complain about all the ways in which their men’s careers superseded theirs, but secretly they were all a little relieved. Weren’t they all raised in families where everyone depended on the earning skill of the man in the house?

  More than that, wasn’t it just a tad emasculating for the woman to be more talented than the man? And, if she was, wasn’t it just so gauche to allow it into the open? And what did it say about her willingness to take a backseat to his pursuits? Yes made her feel bad and No made him feel bad. It was a creative woman’s problem, a battle she could not win.

  Cymbeline placed her napkin next to her partially finished lunch. “You can tell me later.”

  Jessie left the dishes next to the sink without washing them, something she intuited would be a mistake on any number of levels. She could sense Cymbeline’s displeasure, boredom, and, oddly enough, bemusement in equal measure. She couldn’t tell if this sort of situation (Waiting for Emile) was amusing or annoying, and not knowing was making Jessie all the more tense.

  “So,” said Jessie, as she glanced around the main room. “Perhaps we should begin.” Cymbeline sat unmoving at the dining room table as Jessie retrieved her satchel from the floor near the front door. She pulled out the Nikon as she circled the room, hoping that she looked as if she were studying the various photographic possibilities; she understood that wanting to appear to be doing what she was actually doing meant she was really in a bad way. That is to say, she was trying to focus on the setups and not on the whereabouts of Emile. It was 12:30 already.

  The room, being relatively spare in its furnishings, did offer some advantages, and Cymbeline’s black clothing and white hair would look quite graphic on the midnight blue chaise. The deep green sofa and slate gray fireplace with the white walls could also be good, though the idea of posing Cymbeline on the blue velvet chaise in the manner of an odalisque seemed humorous for a woman who’d once said “I invented the male nude” and all the flak she took for those pictures. The blocks of color in the room made Jessie sorry not to be shooting in color.

  Jessie had called Emile once before and once immediately after lunch, so that, when the phone rang, she almost jumped to answer before remembering that it wasn’t her phone. She listened to Cymbeline listening to someone on the other end of the line and hoped that it was Emile, working his Emile-ness. He had the kind of charm that women could see through, and that he knew women could see through, so everyone ended up laughing and he was forgiven in the end; it was like a fun house of charm, full of infinity mirrors of charm. Then Cymbeline laughed, and, for the smallest moment, Jessie could clearly see the girl in the old woman. Everything about Cymbeline shifted with that wonderful laugh. She heard her say, “Bring two, would you, dear? I can’t thank you enough.” Then she hung up without saying good-bye.

  Jessie remembered the times that she had spoken on the phone with Cymbeline, setting up this appointment, and how the woman didn’t say good-bye then either. The first time she thought they had been cut off, and the second time that the older woman was rude.

  She was too shy and too proud to ask if that was Emile; asking, she felt, made her seem lovelorn and incompetent and unprofessional. She might be lovelorn, but she wasn’t unprofessional. As weird as it felt not having her strobes and umbrellas, Jessie told herself that photographing Cymbeline according to the photographic principles of Cymbeline’s f/64 group carried a kind of correctness. Cymbeline wouldn’t be out of her element in the light of her own living room.

  With this in mind, Jessie photographed Cymbeline as she had photographed: in natural light, sharp contrast, no planned manipulation in the darkroom, no intention of cropping the image. The picture representing the reality of that day. Who ever would’ve thought that being tethered to reality in photography would present such a challenge?

  Of course, the reality for Jessie would be that she would always see in this picture the absence of Emile.

  Emile Pasqua was sitting in the little backstreet San Francisco bar in North Beach called the Youki Singe Tea Room. It was a funny place, with eccentric decor devoted to all things Japanese and French without having a coherent idea of what either meant. In the back was a traditional teahouse, where the clientele (a mix of poets, grad students, secretaries, and longshoremen) smoked weed.

  Jessie was twenty-four and newly returned from Morocco, where she had fallen in love with an ex-architecture student who dreamed of growing Cara Cara oranges, which led to a romance with an American expat living in a stucco room above the bluest sea, followed by a brief interlude with a disenchanted stockbroker trying to “find himself,” which led to a thing with a traveling radical from Berkeley who explained that one was either “on the bus or off the bus.” She decided to get on, and followed him home. They eventually parted, and she allowed him to think that their breakup left her sad, when she was really only relieved. It was a lot of work being his handmaiden, and once the lust burned to ash, there was no real reason to stay.

  Throughout her life, on family and solo vacations, Jessie would visit the known homes of artistic women—Georgia O’Keeffe, Emily Dickinson, Dorothy Parker, the Brontës, Lee Miller. Isadora Duncan proved particularly difficult since her Bay Area family was constantly evicted, leaving their belongings as they stole away in the dark of night. Sometimes she could go inside, other times she saw their homes from the sidewalk; either way she documented all these visits on film, which were eventually assembled into a show at a Berkeley gallery, catching the attention of the women’s art collective w
ho loved her “Women-centric journeys that celebrated the Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman.”

  It actually was “empowering” to be with a group of politicized, creative women, even if Jessie existed more on the fringe. Her sense of humor kept her from being as radical as some of the women, and her belief in the fairness of equal rights kept her in their company. Or, to put it another way, she wouldn’t call her work the product of “Women-centric journeys”—her photographs were more like “cut-rate side trips”; the collective’s assessment gave her work a larger import when her motivation wasn’t political at all but a personal combination of curiosity and affection. Still, with the way things were going in the movement, if you weren’t “on the bus,” you were “off the bus.”

  It was around this time that Jessie was introduced to Emile in the Youki Singe Tea Room. A small gallery in the City had decided to show her “Side Trip Series,” and friends and friends of friends were meeting at the Youki Singe after the opening. At some point in the evening, talk turned to Weegee, and Emile (whom Jessie would describe as “easy on the eyes”) said, “If you like crime scenes, you should check out the Baltimore Medical Examiner’s Office.” When Jessie pressed him for more information, he said, “I don’t want to ruin it for you.”

  The next day, an envelope was delivered with a plane ticket to Baltimore and a note that said, Congratulations again. Call me when you get back. Emile. Her first impulse was to send it back, saying, I can buy my own plane tickets, but then again, it was the perfect overture: the intrigue of whatever it was at the Baltimore Medical Examiner’s Office; the right amount of imagination; the celebration that could prompt a gift; the right amount of distance (he didn’t ask her to go with him); the ideal excuse for a date (“Tell me what you think”); the fact that he was even interested in what she thought. The confidence that she would use the ticket. More to the point, it was also the most ingenious test to see what sort of girl she was, because if she was someone who would fly three thousand miles to see she didn’t-know-what, then she could be the girl for him. And, true to what she learned about him later, he probably expected her to see through this romantica gesture, and he knew that she knew that he knew that she did. Geez, thought Jessie, this guy is good.

  • • •

  The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death was a series of eighteen dollhouse dioramas set into the wall on the third floor of the Baltimore Medical Examiner’s Office, and made by a grandmotherly millionaire with an unsavory obsession for unexplained violent crime. The attention to detail in these tiny tableaux was staggering: a silk stocking that had been knit using sewing needles with the width of a human hair, rooms furnished down to the dust on the furniture, imitation food painted with such care that it was hard to accept it as imitation, perfectly fashioned cigarette butts littering bisque ashtrays.

  It wasn’t enough to people and furnish her idealized rooms; she placed within each one a corpse or two who had met their demise by accident, murder, or suicide. The deaths were as exquisitely rendered as the settings and props, right down to the rope around the neck, the blood that gushed from a well-placed wound, the fracturing of limbs and skulls, the bloat from drowning in one’s own bathtub. There were rigor mortis and busted furniture and glass, an icebox left open next to the dead housewife. There were flowered wallpaper, pink slippers, an ironing board, a gun, a knife, a struggle, a murder. Jessie learned that Mrs. Glessner Lee used them for her forensics lectures, being an amateur, three-dimensional Weegee, albeit one who wasn’t content to report the crime. She wanted to re-create the crime. Solve the crime. Then talk about how she solved the crime. They were, in short, exquisite little horror shows. Jessie couldn’t tear herself away, even as she battled revulsion. This was exactly the sort of thing—this little cultural footnote, this odd little feminine detour—that she loved.

  Jessie photographed the miniatures, discarded any writings of Mrs. Glessner Lee, replacing them with her own stories of the scenes accompanying her photos. Each one a love affair gone wrong, illustrating the physicality of the loss of love. It was her most conflicted project and one that she hadn’t planned to show until a friend ended up at her studio (still mostly just a room in her enormous and very cheap South of Market loft), returned to New York, told another friend, who then asked for transparencies, which she was hesitant to send. At the time, Jessie worried that this strange series would define her. Sometimes she thinks the works of an artist are like slots on a roulette wheel; you make one project or picture after another until the wheel stops and you are “discovered,” never knowing if the discovery is going to be the project that most represents you.

  • • •

  A few months after Jessie’s return and the news about New York, the same group was back at the Youki Singe Tea Room, again with Emile. It should have been awkward since she hadn’t bothered calling him upon her return, but he seemed genuinely unconcerned. When she tried to apologize in a semiprivate moment during the evening, he said, “Really, you don’t have to. The dioramas were just something I thought you’d find interesting.”

  How did you know? she wanted to ask. She had been with other men who, even after several months, knew nothing about her. Yet she spent one evening with Emile and ended up with a photography show in New York. Sometimes, Jessie found it challenging not to believe in Fate, or past lives, or rays of light or whatever the fuck when it came to love.

  As the evening progressed, Jessie and Emile joined the others in the little teahouse, only to have the power fail in the bar twice in the space of five minutes. Amid the flickering light, the music that blared, then went silent, then blared, then went silent, then back on, and that jump of one’s pulse, Jessie began to fall into the most delicious love of her life. As Emile walked her back to her loft that night, they passed a shallow alley where he pulled into the shadows, pressing her against the uneven brick wall, kissing her so hard that she experienced an erotic suspension of time and place that, heretofore, she had never believed in. “My god,” she said, barely catching her breath, “if you make me laugh when I’m not wrecked, I’m marrying you.”

  In many respects, it was the depth of her feeling for Emile, that heedless plunge (and he did make her laugh), combined with a photography career that kept her in the women’s art collective. Without her independence, she would end up following Emile to the ends of the earth; without Emile, her independence would turn to dust. She needed both things—love and independence; photography and Emile. She laid her concerns before Emile, who agreed that it was a new age, when it was possible to have everything. “Your photography is one of the things I love best about you.” That’s what he said. That’s what he told her as he unbuttoned her blouse.

  Two years and they almost live together, they joke. Emile has a place in Berkeley that they mostly share, when he isn’t mostly sharing her studio in the City. After the show in New York, Jessie won a Guggenheim Fellowship, had a catalog published, had another show of her Violent Rooms of Love series, got another small grant, enough to photograph statues in France for a month, resulting in a show called Women on Pedestals. She received a trio of honors, including an artist-in-residence at a college in Rhode Island that she hadn’t yet decided to accept.

  They didn’t officially live together, much less marry, because “no right-thinking radical feminist would buy into the current cultural hegemony of marriage,” which did nothing for women but expect them to accept and submit. However, living together wasn’t far off from marriage, and while Jessie and Emile never rejected the idea of an open relationship, they never agreed on it either. Maybe this was why she was hesitant to bring up his recent behavior, which included not always being where he said he would be. She wasn’t the kind of person to keep track of anyone, and now she wondered if her trust was just naïveté. The confusion for her was that he was still the same Emile. Loving. Supportive. Making her laugh.

  They also never discussed the possibility of one of them having the greater success, and that one not being
Emile.

  “Is Berlin your given name?”

  Jessie had been struggling with distraction, taking a few frames of Cymbeline on the blue chaise.

  “It’s Saltman.” It was sometimes odd to have a camera to your eye as you were talking to someone.

  “Were you married?”

  Jessie gave a little laugh. “Never. Um, maybe tilt your face, to catch the light—there.” Working with the glare off eyeglasses is always a bit of a trick.

  “Warum heiβt du Berlin?”

  “Sorry? I don’t speak German.”

  “I asked why you’re called Berlin.”

  “Why should I continue the patriarchal theft of my identity by keeping my father’s name?”

  Cymbeline shifted on the chaise, placing her feet on the floor.

  “Besides, most of the women I know have rechristened themselves: Chicago, London, Shanghai, Cairo—”

  Cymbeline burst out laughing. “You all sound like an atlas.”

  Jessie laughed along with her.

  “So, you aren’t close to your father.”

  “You know, he supported everything I ever wanted to do. He never once said that I had to marry and have children.”